“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino
“Little Did They Know”
Chapter One
The door to the house was locked with the heavy metal key.
Night had given way to a windy morning amidst thunder and sheets
of rain that, once or twice during the year, would come down
from the mountains looking to nestle behind every stone wall in
the clustered caves of Sheshi.
The shadows that followed, uniting and separating, touched
every stone as if to take with them their invisible luster, so
familiar in years past. That morning, the stones on Sheshi’s
narrow street had felt especially soft and shiny, like so many
falling stars on the night of Saint Lawrence.
We climbed as one, the four of us, holding fast to the
brightness of the stones and to the sound of the bells
whispering from the clock in the center of Sheshi. The cold, wet
streaks of the wind forced us to flock together much as the few
street lights fading away in the deep emptiness of the
precipices where barren foothills were cradled in thick layers
of gray clouds. When we reached the top of the hill, we could
see other clouds, white and cold, descending from the mountains
to lay a transparent sheet of ice on the rooftops.
The train station stood on the tallest knoll overlooking
all of Sheshi. The massive stone and brick structure had been
built by men in black shirts who had worked in unison, moving to
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2
the sound of a whistle which hung about the collar of another
black shirt. “This is the entrance to a new world,” said the
tall official, also clad in black, when he christened the train
station and hurled a bottle of white wine that bubbled when it
hit the front wall. To the eldest of us, that must have seemed a
very long time ago. Now the platform of the train station stood
deserted. Along it, prickly shrubs were immobile, unperturbed by
the wind; their stiffness added to the firmness of the
platform’s steel and white stone.
In the waiting room reserved for third-class passengers, my
mother’s fingers, always so firm and flexible, seemed bent by
the silence and the feeling of impotence that reigned in the
place. Her home was being taken away from her by circumstances
beyond her control. Of the four of us, she was the one who had
accepted banishment for the sake of an answer to a question she
was destined never to receive from anyone.
It was close to five o’clock when the tiny silver bell on
the front wall of the train station began to announce the
imminent arrival of the train. The sun was just beginning to
peek from behind the lowest of the seven mountains when we saw
the approaching locomotive puffing its way out of the tunnel. I
watched my mother grow pale and her fingers grow as stiff as the
cold on top of the treetops. The umbilical cord was finally
being cut from her womb and thrown onto the dirt floor of our
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino
3
one- room home. Her mind wandered to a time which only she could
remember. It was the bleeding hour of her first birth. The
coarse white sheets her mother had given her had been in the
family for generations. They were completely drenched in blood.
The large copper pot of boiling water was emptied to clean the
creature one step away from the mother, both pride and loss
wrapped together. The round faced boy with wide open eyes left
an indelible mark on all those present in the house.
The grandmother took her firstborn grandchild to the
village’s central fountain; there she dipped him three times
into waters that all deemed to be unquestionably sacred. The
women busy scrubbing barely raised their eyes to get a glimpse
of the sparkle in the old woman’s eyes. “That night,” my
grandmother was to remind us on the anniversary of the birth of
her first grandchild, “the house shook from a minor earthquake.
The cracks in the walls grew deeper and wider. Days after, your
grandfather traced the cause of the tremor to the brightness of
the eyes of the newborn. An invisible line connected his eyes to
the cracks on the walls.”
I look at my mother’s face now. I hear the first sound of
the bell at the train station. I can clearly see my
grandmother’s presence in her wrinkled forehead.
In the village they called my grandmother “Faela.” Sitting
next to the ashen walls of the wood-burning fireplace, she would
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4
wait impatiently for the first signs of spring. She stood tall
and erect and had gone completely gray. She claimed fifteen
births for herself, although only eleven children survived.
Veiled in nobility, her countenance displayed strength of
character. One of the nine founders of the village, she was one
of the great mothers of Sheshi. It was rumored that she had been
the one to name it. Grandmother Faela had come from the blue
mountains with only a cane to support her ailing health. She had
carried a bundle filled with a few slices of dark bread and
thirty-three dried figs.
At the monthly meetings, Faela was carried to the village
square on her oak chair; it took one hundred men to lift the
seat of mystery. No one could trace when or by whom the chair
had been made, or how its oak pieces were held together. Yet all
the men of the village hastened to lift it when the town fiddler
played the call of the serpent. This occasion was attended by
everyone in Sheshi. Meals were left unfinished, promises broken,
pain banished and death forgotten for the duration of the
gathering. It began at the first sound of the bell from the
white chapel, which had been brought stone by stone from
Constantinople by those mountain men with sharp golden
moustaches and eagle eyes. The church had been reconstructed
upon the place of the sacred cave where night met the day and
the earth, the deeps of the sea. There, the elders whispered,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino
5
sound became color and fire fused with water. At the center, an
altar of silvery waters gave birth to fish with paws and wings.
The mother serpent breathed life into the flowers. The bells
rang louder and louder, suffocating all sounds, both human and
animal. The earth trembled, fusing rock upon rock, leaf atop
leaf, sound with sound. The great oak chair moved toward the
tabernacle; eyes were bathed by the rays from her face, a
burning red mask. Alone, with wings spread, the great mother
descended into the deep waters. Then throngs of screaming women
wet their lips and sharp nipples with the sacred waters, and the
burning rays turned pink, the carmine streaked with white.
Distant greens and grays clothed the slender bodies, collecting
the ashes scattered in the pool of water. The women begged for
strength as the throbbing structure fed itself from heartbeat to
heartbeat.
The full moon had painted the sky with elongated lines of
smoke rising from the stone chimneys of the homes. It was the
time of the evening meal. The partition of bread by the head of
the table traveled silently from one end of the town to the
other. It had been baked by the rays of the sun chasing
butterflies on a sea of yellow fields and eager sailing boats in
search of blue horizons. The houses floated into the arms of the
night. Darkness moved firmly to cover the rooftops. The windows
shot, promises broken, flesh with flesh. The serpent sucked the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino
6
last drop of milk from her breast, slowly winding its way down
to the nest under the pile of wood left there since last spring,
the smell of its olive bark changing from year to year.
The serpent had made its way to the waiting room of the
train station. Unaffected by its presence, we fixed our eyes on
its scaly white pocked back as it moved through the suitcases.
The train master, clothed in the state uniform, turned on the
lights of the station’s platform. The dusty railroad carriage
opened its door to receive the passengers barely discernible
through the black vapor. With a sharp pull, the conductor sealed
the entrance to the coach and ordered the train engineer to move
on.
The mountain mist quickly engulfed the last of the light of
the train station. For many years to come, the three passengers
who stepped on to the carriage that early morning in 1958 were
to feel the silence sealed in the coach by the early lights of
dawn. My mother sat petrified between my brother and me. The
smell of the earth, recently plowed for early spring planting,
seeped through the cracks of the carriage as it made its way
through the mountain tunnels. The heavy rains had turned into a
soft drizzle, rendering the landscape fuzzy. I looked at
Grandmother Faela’s house at the end of the village as the train
emerged from the last tunnel of the seven mountains. Sheshi
seemed like a lonely drifting cloud in the emptiness of
dawn.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino
7
Then I recalled Grandmother Faela’s last words to my mother.
“Just remember, every home has four walls no matter where it
stands.” Only years later would I come to understand the
importance of staying within one’s protective walls.
My mother, who had been staring at me as I tried to cling
to the fading speck of whiteness of Sheshi in the distance,
suddenly said, “Make certain you never forget the road back to
the village.” For the remainder of the morning, she spoke no
more. I knew then that she had succumbed to the curse of the
outsiders. It was rumored that unexplained things would happen
to those strangers who ended up on the road that led to Sheshi
from the outside. Those who left the village tormented by the
dreams of a better place full of riches would never again be
able to recover their lost memories or to recognize themselves
in the mirror of time.
The very name of Sheshi was rarely mentioned, even by the
village’s elderly. Many a time I had heard stories of wanderers
who, through unexplained circumstances, found themselves beset
with fears on the road that led to the village. No one in Sheshi
could ever precisely locate the source of their fear. It was
said in secret that it lay deep in the first water well dug
under the floor of the Church of the Dead. Not even the eldest
of the elders, who boasted of having gone beyond one hundred
years by three decades, knew of its beginnings. “It must have
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8
happened before things assumed their present shape, before light
separated itself from darkness, and before the eyes of the
people were covered by the gray mist that comes down from the
seven mountains,” he explained when asked.
The train had come out of the last tunnel as I fixed my
eyes on the man seated in front of us in the compartment; he
offered a piece of bread to his companion with a slight movement
of the arm. The slice came from a round loaf of bread baked a
day ago. The woman quickly glanced around the compartment and
then decidedly pushed his hand away from her. The two rarely
exchanged a look nor spoke a word to one another for the
remainder of the trip. Their faces were expressionless, locked
behind an impenetrable wall of mistrust; laws upon laws reeling
the movement of their hands and the selection of the surrounding
images. There they sat in front of us, seductively immutable.
The woman, grave, looked no different than the long array of
elders in Sheshi sitting outside their homes waiting for a
letter or for the sudden appearance of their loved one on the
dirt road that led to the train station. Clothed in silence,
these women carried on their shoulders a conviction in their
beliefs as thick as the walls of their homes.
I recalled the words which my mother repeated with the
precision of a clock: “In this world the elders never speak.
Words are like knives. They open wounds when they are not used
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino
9
properly.” Now my eyes met hers in the closeness of the train
compartment. The same words had lined up busily inside her mind.
Distance had blanked out the few remaining houses at the
extremities of Sheshi. The seven mountains were a mere winding,
broken line on the distant horizon. The train had ventured
outside the sacred space. All of us inside the individual
compartments had become outsiders. Those who left it, beckoned
by the promise of a better life in a distant place, would never
be able to recover the lost memories and would undergo a change
in the composition of their blood.
The very name of the village
was being lost as forgetfulness contaminated everyone. The days
of old, barely held together by makeshift ropes made out of wild
cane leaves, roamed into the empty spaces of the train
compartment. They carried hopes of better days in a new land
abundant with fertile pockets of soil eager to protect every
seed planted. Joyous sounds mingled with the floating rays of
the sun. The sermons at the tabernacle at the center of Sheshi
had vanished into the depths of silence.
I struggled to hear the bells of the Church of the Dead. At
one time they rang faster than the flight of the black swallows
around the tower. The almond trees that lined the round space of
the village square were no obstacle to the passionate call of
the bells. From the village’s narrow roads, in black shawls and
with eyes downcast, descended dozens of women. Each took her
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 10
seat in the first ten rows of the Church of the Dead. Behind
them sat the men, who paid no heed to the numerous insults of
the others who never stepped inside the place of worship. From
the dilapidated door on the side of the altar emerged the town’s
priest, Prefti Vlasi, summoned by the feeble sound of the bell
rung by the church keeper. Barely in his fifties, Prefti Vlasi
had already made preparations for his moment of death. He had
let it be known that his two pieces of furniture, which he had
brought with him from his native village with great difficulty,
were to remain with the church. The two antique pieces had been
given to him by his great aunt, whose name, written in copper,
could still be read on the back of each piece. It was rumored
that this great aunt had died from a love potion wrongly
prepared by a close relative. The priest’s two prized books…a
copy of a lost Pelasguian text transcribed into Latin by an
Albanian Imam on top of the minaret and a list of songs in
ancient hieroglyphics…were to be given to the village’s one
reader, Eskandër, who would spend the remaining years of his
life trying to insert more hours into the clock in order to
decipher the ancient hieroglyphics.
Eskandër was well known in Sheshi. Some of the villagers
even believed that he would live until there would be no need of
him. The letters he wrote for the people of the village reached
into the four corners of the world. To the amazement of many,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 11
Eskandër did not even use black currant berry ink with turkey
feathers to write into the dry sheep skins the long list of
unending tears, sighs and deep wounds that reached across every
ocean and ended only when they plunged into the hearts of those
who had dared to venture away from their homes. The pain was
particularly excruciating for those who had lost the memories of
the road that could have taken them back to Sheshi.
With unshaven face and deep black smudges under his eyes,
Prefti Vlasi made no attempt to hide the sadness of the times.
The Mass he had prepared to celebrate had no beginning and no
end. Amidst yawns and closed eyelids, he spoke of the changed
times. “I see nothing but disrespect for the old, abandoned by
their young ones. Greed and immoral behavior have extended their
tentacles into every corner of Sheshi. The holy water in the
font has been shedding bloody tears. I see fewer and fewer of
our people opening the door to the church.”
To the people who took part in the daily service, this
lament was just part of the same song. Prefti Vlasi could not
keep his eyes from looking towards the side window of the
church, where he could catch a glimpse of the sky that reached
his native village, Mali e Sezë, at the foot of a crooked,
barren mountain that changed color according to the position of
the sun. The town had been carved out of the black mountain six
hundred years earlier by a group of Albanian mountaineers who
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 12
called themselves gheghiërs. Among these people with watery blue
eyes and sun-colored moustaches, no woman was to be found.
The gheghiërs had been called by the King of Naples to
bring order to the rebellious southern lands of his kingdom. But
it soon came to pass that the procurement of the peace proved to
be more costly to the realm than the remaining pockets of
dissension within the empire. The king decided on his own to
reward the white-capped Albanian soldiers as quickly as he
could. He himself signed a decree giving them administrative
power over all the lands surrounding the outposts south of
Naples.
During the celebration of Mass, Prefti Vlasi never failed
to hear the heavy breathing of the long caravan of Albanians as
they moved towards the “Promised Land.” He lifted his eyes and
saw his flock as bereft as he was behind the altar of the
presence of his Master. He knew exactly where the ceremony began
and where it ended in the Holy Book in front of him. He saw the
round, multi-colored window on the front of the church darkened
by the gray clouds hanging over it. The rains came down with
heavy thundering. Prefti Vlasi thought of the caravan camped
just above the three gorges. Most of the soldiers had taken
refuge in a dozen caves high above the roaring floods that came
down unopposed from the seven mountains. The heavy rains which
lasted for weeks made them aware of the advantages of making the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 13
caves their permanent abodes. The men worked night and day
carving the volcanic stone from under the mountain. No one,
Prefti Vlasi recalled his great-grandfather saying, had noticed
that an important element was missing. There were no women. Busy
plundering the countryside and carving under the mountain, the
men had forgotten the need for women and the nestling of their
dreams. Meetings were held to discuss this grave situation. They
lasted until the floods subsided. The young men of the group of
soldiers, led in prayers by the bearded priest dressed in black,
unveiled the sacred icon of the Virgin Mary and Child, which had
been rescued from the burning city of Constantinople, and named
the village with three sprays of the sacred water. They called
it “Sheshi.” Soon after, the bearded priest decided to send a
messenger to the fallen city of Constantinople to relay a
request: he wished for Taras, the leader of the city now called
Istanbul, to release to them the captured Christian women in
recognition of the service of the Albanians to the Turkish
pashas.
It took fifty years for the women to reach Sheshi. To
the astonishment of the young villagers who had been struggling
not to forget their great grandfathers, the women looked all
alike.
The women arrived in Sheshi in long wooden carts pulled by
fifty enormous white bulls with horns twisted in the shape of a
quarter- moon. One by one, the giant bulls were systematically
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 14
slaughtered during the festivities that lasted for more than
thirty days. The merchants who had brought the women to the
village all died of water poisoning on the first day of spring.
The death of the merchants, with their egg-shaped black hats,
did not come as a surprise to the elders of the village.
However, the well from which the merchants had satisfied their
unquenchable thirst for hours was forever closed to the public.
For many years, the children playing near the well would relate
to their mothers the suffocating cries which came from below the
spring and which, at times, surfaced to the top like green water
bubbles, each with a slice of the rainbow.
On one of those particularly hot afternoons which came once
every one hundred years, the first-born child of each of the
captive mothers filled the square of Sheshi with flying
multicolored cone-shaped globules gathered from the well since
the early morning hours. Half human, half animal cries tried
desperately to find an opening through the evasive, soapy
surface of each bubble. The black swallows, which had not been
seen for so many months that the village folk despaired of ever
again following their flight through the corridors of the sky to
reach their wheat fields, suddenly flocked to the square from
miles and miles around the countryside. The birds pecked
frantically against the floating droplets to free the anguished
callers, but to no avail.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 15
Years later, those who could still recall the miracle of
that late afternoon in March never tired of recounting the event
to the young ones; they endeavored to make as few modifications
as possible in order to preserve the intensity and the anguish
of the captives’ cries. No one had any difficulty at all in
believing these events; nor did anyone question the personal
additions with which, despite their best intentions, the elders
enhanced the sequence of the happenings.
In time the women of the village came to compare the
pregnant water droplets to the hours of birth that yearly
lacerated their bodies and opened deep cracks in every house
that lined the main square. The wounds carved in the cement were
left exposed to the blustery winds of November and the heavy
snows of January. For generations, no one in the village dared
to get close to the fissures to assess the yearly damage.
The odor that continually emanated from the lacerations
rested on leaves of the almond tree. Only the unfailing rains of
the first weeks of fall lessened the feeling that the earth was
rotting in its womb. Prefti Vlasi was fated to carry that odor
to his tomb. It was how the people of Sheshi identified his
resting place even after they had forgotten what he looked like.
For this reason, the cemetery caretaker saw no need to reprint
the priest’s name with lead or to indicate the dates of his stay
on earth after the marble tomb took a direct hit from a bolt of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 16
lightening that twirled down from the sky that hovered over the
tallest of the seven mountains. Everyone in Sheshi seemed
convinced that the fumes which accompanied Prefti Vlasi in the
last days of his life would outlast everyone else in the village
and travel even beyond their boundaries. For the young men of
Sheshi who had gone to the four corners of the earth, that odor
was an unmistakable verification of their place of origin. Who
could have predicted with any certainty, at that time, that,
generations later, Prefti Vlasi’s dream of reaching the furthest
corners of the globe would come true in the dark alleys of New
York and on the streets of sighs of La Boca facing the dark
waters of the river with two faces?
Prefti Vlasi’s last benediction to his flock was followed
by the sound of the bell announcing the end of the novena. In
the faces of the few parishioners who had attended the service
the anxiety to return home was apparent. Night was descending
quickly on Sheshi. With the church empty, Prefti Vlasi hurried
to close the doors to avoid the chill evening air. He had quite
a way to go before he could reach the protection of his home.
The village’s narrow streets had become abruptly engulfed
in a voluminous silence. The priest followed the distant
silhouette of one of his worshipers. Wrapped in her dark shawl,
she hurried steadily towards her home. The nimble footed old
woman was known throughout the village as Sina. “What would it
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 17
take to show these people the way to salvation?” Prefti Vlasi
queried. “What steps could I take to free them from their
perennial fears of the inevitable destructions that lurk in the
darkest depths of the night?” A feeling of impotence prevented
him from even attempting to find an answer to the burden he had
painfully carried with him ever since his arrival in Sheshi.
The empty house on the edge of the village glistened with a
lonely yellow light. The volcanic stone structure, shaped like a
cone, could be seen from every corner of the village. The people
of Sheshi knew too well what Prefti Vlasi undertook every night
as he walked from the Church of the Dead to his home. He had to
cross every street before reaching it. Behind their doors, some
listened attentively to the struggle between Prefti Vlasi and
the cries of fate. “Is he wounded?” some asked from the safety
of their homes. Others, terrified of the undefined wailings,
filled their doors with crosses and garlic wreaths to ward off
the evil voices from trying to sneak through their locks or
through the invisible cracks in the walls. Those nights were
long and dreary, and no one dared open the door in the morning
until Prefti Vlasi announced his victory over the devils with
three piercing tolls from the church bells of the great Church
of the Virgin of Constantinople. This ritual was repeated at
sunset and at the crack of dawn. No one knew when it all had
begun or when it would come to an end.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 18
Mother must also have been thinking of Prefti Vlasi. She
had gone through her prayer beads three times since we had left
the train station. The train easily traveled along the straight
tracks with a continuous monotonous sound. The two passengers
sitting across from us had not closed their eyes, but they did
not appear to be looking at anything at all. The shawl still
covered the woman’s face like an impenetrable wall, revealing
nothing of the world hidden behind it. The train whistle entered
the compartment and faded away as quickly as it had sounded.
Around me, tired faces were enveloped by invisible fates.
On the horizon, streaks of light had already embraced the
colors of the night. The train tracks floated through gray
fields with dispersed hues of green. The tracts of land
multiplied as the locomotive gained speed. From the cracks of
the windows a speck of sea air made its way into the carriage.
At first, the odor, unlike that given off by land plants,
remained unrecognized. It did, however, force the passengers to
open their eyes against their will. “It must be harvest time for
some other people,” uttered someone in the compartment to our
left. A different voice promptly warned him of the danger of
unfamiliar odors. “They make you forget the road back home,” he
admonished. There was no answer.
I glanced at the raindrops fusing with one another on the
windowpane until they were swept away by the wind. An even
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 19
deeper silence had taken over the whole carriage. Mother had
still not closed her eyes. Around her neck hung a cord from
which, secured with many knots, the heavy metal key to the house
was suspended. That key was destined to become the bridge
connecting the world she had known for so long to the one she
had been promised but would never find.
My memory fastened upon the Sunday meals my mother
ceremoniously prepared once she had gathered from the fields all
that others had overlooked in times of harvest. Once sorted out,
the yield was set aside and jealously guarded for the long
winters. Sunday was a call to gather around the fireplace, where
olive tree stumps slowly burned, filling the one-room house with
the smell of olives ripened in the month of November. The small
flame was the revered source of heat, and the light it gave off
was our family’s only protection against the night. Brief
imaginary harvests were relived through the assortment of the
fruit and grains which my mother had found. The salvaged
chestnuts, almonds and figs were handled with utmost reverence.
Nothing was discarded. “One day you will not feel the shame of
picking up what others left behind in the fields.” It was father
who said this, his back turned to the fireplace. Not long after,
my younger brother and I decided to no longer suffer from want.
“We will take what we need and as we please from those who have
it,” I assured my brother. I knew exactly where every fruit tree
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 20
grew in Sheshi and the type of fruit it bore. My after school
hours were dedicated to finding what the family needed to lessen
our hunger.
In time, the sharp needle of pain which I carried within
me from place to place lessened to the point of seeming a
faithful companion. It was such a familiar and constant pain
that when my mind managed to wander into another thought, I felt
as if half of me were missing. I had learned to bear and hide
the pain with the precision of the seasons that came and went,
leaving behind the howling of the wind and the thirst of the
fields quenched by the rains.
No one knew of my affliction, save, perhaps, for my
mother, who daily found a few coins in her pocket, not knowing
where they had come from nor how they found refuge there. At
times she took it as a gift from Divine Providence when she
found a small sack of fresh olives which I had taken from their
hiding place under the earth of the olive groves and left for
her. She never failed to share these gifts with Angelina whose
house faced ours and whose limp was familiar to all in the
village.
Angelina had been widowed by the last war and then
forgotten by her two sons, who left Sheshi convinced they could
find black gold in the sunless fields of the Orinoco. I soon
came to realize that it was not the olives that Angelina came
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 21
for, nor the few roasted chestnuts, but news of her two sons
from the train when it stopped to fill its belly with water at
the station on top of the hill. Mother always gave her the same
answer. “The train is late today.” Angelina remained
unconvinced, for she could hear the rumbling of the locomotive
even before it entered the first of the seven tunnels. The only
thing she could not detect for certain, at times, was the exact
number of carriages that accompanied the locomotive and that was
because of the tricks that her eyes played on her.
Morning after morning, Angelina got up hours before the
first train was due to arrive. She drank her barley coffee and,
without going beyond the time allotted to the alleviating moment
of its aroma, she took her seat in front of the dilapidated
window and, with her fingers crossed, she waited to hear the
distant sound of the train. No one in the vicinity of Angelina’s
house could say how long she had been waiting for the one train
that would bring back her two sons. But, as the days, the
months, and the years went by, and the trees she could see in
the distance changed in size and in color, she herself began to
wonder at it all and to feel uneasy about her desire to hear the
scraping of the train’s wheels along the tracks. A painful
feeling reverberated inside her breasts. It reminded her of the
faraway, distressing sensation she had felt during childbirth.
She had borne three dead children out of five. The last two had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 22
been just three years old when their father, in a black uniform
and feathered hat, had waved good bye to them with an uncertain
smile. Angelina kept looking for that smile until her last
breath not long after a fateful day. It had been raining
incessantly for thirty-three days when, to her utter amazement,
Angelina heard the train stop at the station of Sheshi for a
long time. Suddenly, the glass on the photographs of her missing
husband and that of her two sons who sought fortune in the high
Andes had shattered into dozens of pieces. Although the
photographs themselves remained miraculously untouched, her
husband’s imposing figure in his Fascist uniform and fine hat
now bore scratches all over the front left side. Soon after, the
cuts began to emit an unmistakable salty odor. It was at that
moment that, in a flash of lucidity, Angelina came to realize
that the train had stopped to deliver the news of the death of
her two sons. She was mistaken.
That day the town’s postman took longer that he should have
to deliver the letter to Angelina’s house. Actually, he could
remember neither the name nor the location of the house. He was
certain that it was one of the many padlocked houses clothed in
vanishing memories that still existed in Sheshi. Perhaps his
father with the watery eyes would have known. The postman spent
hours with the municipal birth records trying to trace the name
of the person on the envelope, now half erased and half eaten by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 23
moths. As he worked, the bells of the Church of the Dead began
to ring, announcing to the townspeople the death of someone. The
postman had made certain that the news of the arrival of the
casket at the train station would have reached everyone in the
four corners of the village before sunset. Later, he stopped to
have a cup of black coffee followed by the usual glass of water
at the town’s only café. There no one else could trace the name
on the envelope to anyone in the village. Yet, each held a vague
memory of having seen someone behind the opaque glass of a
window while en route to the fields. As time went by and with so
many changes in Sheshi, people simply began to think of the old
woman as one of the dead who watched over them.
That morning Prefti Vlasi could barely rise from his high
wooden bed. He could not move his legs and he coughed
convulsively. He had to gather all his strength to call
Serafina. “Dust the high altar and the font seats. Make certain
you replace the holy water from the font. We are going to
celebrate Mass for someone coming home.”
Serafina placed some wood on the stove and warmed a cup of
black tea for Prefti Vlasi so that his cough might ease before
he had to face his parishioners. The holy water in the font had
given life to a variety of living things and the smell was so
unbearable that it would take months to get rid of it with the
help of wild rose petals. Serafina could not recall the last
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 24
time she had cleaned the marble font, and that made her a bit
uneasy. “One never knows how things move outside this church
anymore,” she sighed as she scrubbed the outer ridge. “It would
be a great help if I could rely on something else to remind me
of the day of the week instead of trusting the hardly audible
sound of the train.” What Serafina missed most was seeing the
children playing outside the main entrance to the church and
sitting on its cool steps in the hot afternoons. She would gaze
at their faces from the door left ajar for that purpose, and,
through their smiles and manners, she would recall the memories
she had stored of their grandparents. At times she had to wait
for days to see the children play outside the church. In their
absence, she recalled the moments of the distant past when the
young ones of Sheshi had been so close to her.
It was in November. For the entire month of October they
had been busy making white candles from bits of pork lard which
had been saved under oil throughout the previous year during the
slaughtering of the family pig. This was the way to close the
harvest and to prepare for the coming snows. No one knew nor
dared to ask where the children gathered to prepare these
candles, but they were exactly the same size and all white so
that the angels could see their reflections in the flames as
they brought the souls of the dead down from on high to the
respective marble tops of their tombs. At this time Sheshi was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 25
always enveloped by a thick fog. The café in the square floated
in smoke and was cloaked with a heavy aroma of black roasted
coffee beans and handmade tobacco butts. In the streets, just a
few lights lit the passageway so as not to confuse the children
as to the exact amount of brightness that each candle needed to
be seen by the angels.
A few hours before the fog descended from the seven
mountains, Aristi had hung dozens of signs inside and outside
the café reminding the men to return home before the clock on
the town hall tower struck twelve. Each man had carried a
lantern and a string attached to the door of his house to avoid
getting lost in the fog. For this reason, it was called “the
night of the strings.” After the final stroke of the midnight
hour, the children came out of their hiding places to gather up
the strings and to weave cradles with them. The weaving, which
was accompanied by beseeching prayers, reminded many of the
newcomers to Sheshi, attracted by the descent of the souls from
the distant skies, of the times past, which they were struggling
to keep alive in the deepest recesses of their memories.
As the town officials made their way up to the station to
receive the returned remains of Angelina’s husband, the women of
the village had been busy placing the children in line with
their pockets full of white candles. With stiffened wax wings on
their backs, the children led the procession to the Chapel of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 26
the Three Crosses midway between the village and the cemetery.
There was even a band of eleven men led by the only musician in
Sheshi. The sad notes of the music provided some consolation to
the grieving men carrying the tiny box. Angelina, however,
appeared confounded, unable to make sense of their outpouring of
grief. That morning, the train had arrived earlier than usual,
forcing all those present at the station to adjust their watches
to the exact time. But what had stunned them was the train
itself, for no one of them had ever seen a locomotive of its
like before. It made no noise and emitted no steam. Times had
certainly changed. As the door of one of the carriages opened, a
neatly dressed young man in a blue uniform deposited the small
wooden box on the platform, boarded the train, and, with the
penetrating sound of the whistle he wore attached to a cord
around his neck, signaled the conductor to move on.
The train faded into the tunnel as quickly as it had
arrived. Angelina, who had witnessed the ceremony with complete
composure, lifted the box and held it with both hands. Years
later she was to recall the smell of ashes that seeped from the
weightless container, bound with shiny strings. Without lifting
her eyes from the box, Angelina resolutely began her descent
from the station to the Church of the Dead. The town officials
who lined the road and the band that followed the cortège were
stunned. The elderly widow could not have managed to walk by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 27
herself with the box containing the remains of her husband. What
they could not see was that the cat’s cradles which the children
had woven of string were now suspending the box for her.
Angelina’s feat was a phenomenon destined to have no explanation
and to be placed in the register of unsolved mysteries by the
town’s official recorder of events.
Half way down to the Church of the Dead, Angelina had lost
her memory of the place. She was unable to find the thread in
the well of her memories. The restoration work done on it and
the addition of five more steps to its entrance to make the
ascent less arduous for the old people of the village, who could
barely lift their feet, made the edifice totally unrecognizable
to her. By instinct and by relying on faint remembrances
difficult to pinpoint, Angelina took the rocky road that led to
the old church carved into the volcanic mount at the edge of the
cliff. The icon of the ancient Virgin Mother of Constantinople
was adorned with fresh flowers gathered by the guardian of the
chapel, a diminutive old man with a white beard and sad eyes.
They knelt and whispered together in broken tones a song
unfamiliar to the children, who had followed the procession. The
young ones, unable to trace the sounds to anything they had ever
heard before, listened to the song as to a brook finding its way
through the rocks and coming to rest amidst the odor of wild
basil. And indeed those whose eyes saw far into the horizon now
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 28
saw basil seeds sprouting from the box which Angelina carried
while the incense of burned leaves intensified around her. The
widow, tearless and steady, handed the box to the children
standing in a circle nearby her.
Quietly, Angelina took the road uphill towards her house.
She was followed by the uneven and unsteady steps of an old man
carrying a lantern on his wooden cane. The thick fog that had
descended from the mountains rendered almost invisible the two
silhouettes, one after the other, as they drifted on the same
path. Angelina turned around and sent a glance through the wall
of fog to her husband, soon to be nourished by the womb of the
damp earth. On the heights of the fog, candle lights flickered.
Angelina turned again and quickly recognized the old bearded man
who had been walking behind her. It was her father. She
identified him by his bent back and uneven steps. He had spent
many years traveling through winding and disappearing roads to
find his way back to the Chapel of the Three Crosses.
Angelina attempted to embrace him and to take hold of his
trembling hand. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?” He
tried to harvest the words together to answer but could not
remember the order of things. “I have been seeking the house
through many winters, but I could not recognize it until the
train came to get me,” he managed to stutter. “The last carriage
stopped at the crossroads of the crooked hill so that I could
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 29
accompany the thousands of boxes of bones to their resting
places.”
That afternoon Angelina made coffee for her father as she
had done so many times in the past. He drank it with tears in
his eyes, recalling the taste of it during those distant early
evenings when he would sit on the stone bench in front of the
house. “The mule had just been loaded with the fresh fruit and
vegetables brought from the fields. The neighborhood children
were busy chasing each other before the sun disappeared behind
the mountains, and the smell of the evening meal shone in their
eyes as they glanced at one another.” He had spent many a year
struggling to find a way to prevent those memories from
withering away. “On that last evening as the church bells rang,
I was returning home, directing the mule so as to avoid any
stone being caught in its shoe. I saw your grandfather resting
on the trunk of an olive tree. Surrounded by hundreds of black
birds, he rested his arms on his chestnut cane and looked
straight towards me with a distant smile.” For the first time in
her life, Angelina thought she saw tears in her father’s eyes.
“At that moment,” he went on to say, “I knew that life would
never be the same. I slowly lifted myself onto the mule and
gently directed the animal to move faster towards home. The old
chestnut trees that lined the road had taken on a life of their
own and, in their shadow, I sensed, for the first time, the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 30
sadness of my isolation. I did not have time to unload the mule.
I rested on this stone bench and realized that I could not even
turn my head all the way to get a last glimpse of the house. I
did take with me the image of the table with the wooden chairs
around it. Your mother must have been busy tending the fire and
seeing to it that the meal would be on the table even before I
unloaded the mule. She did not think to look outside. I remember
lowering my head slightly, and the world around me became
silent.”
Her father’s last words brought up long-hidden memories in
Angelina. She recalled how that evening, after they had found
her father’s body slumped on the stone bench, no one had said a
word. Little had she known that the little girl, already with
the forlorn look of a widow, had been destined to take the reins
of the family at a young age. She had worked the fields with her
brothers and younger sister as the mother sat day after day,
month after month, on the wooden chair, her eyes fixed through
the winds and the rains on the road which, to her mind, was to
bring back her husband.
“One winter morning,” she now recalled,
“she closed one eye and left the other open, just in case he
would find his way back home. She was buried without receiving
the last rites from the town’s priest. He was convinced that she
was still alive.” Many years later, Angelina herself was to
relive that distant morning as she herself took her place next
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 31
to the window waiting for the train to bring back her own
husband from the long war. As the years passed, the noise from
the tracks became fainter and fainter. Angelina’s black dress
had lost its luster and was turning powdery gray.
To make certain that the old lady would still be there, the
postman of Sheshi customarily sat down, once his late afternoon
rounds were through and everyone else had left the one-room
office, to write his usual letter to Angelina Driza. He simply
wanted to keep her alive and to dream of her sparkling eyes. He
searched for the right words in an old dictionary and sprinkled
them with ashes, ever careful not to betray his feelings. The
postman’s name was Anisi, and he was the last person in the
village who knew of Angelina Driza and who could find the road
that led from the post office to the door of her house, which
stood beneath her window.
It was not easy for Anisi to get there once a year. It
took him days to find the scarcely visible road and months to
avoid the alleys that crisscrossed one another and had only one
entrance and no exit. Anisi learned to rely entirely on certain
faded faces painted in black ink on the stone walls. The
paintings depicted an angry person with bulging eyes and jutting
chin, wearing a black uniform. The postman had seen Angelina
waving good-bye to her husband with one hand while she held her
two children close to her with the other. Hers was the face
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 32
Anisi remembered the day darkness fell upon him. The black lines
on the wall blackened further as he turned from one alley into
another, and it did not take long for the postman to realize
that the faces were actually still alive. Afterwards, the
postman did not share his discovery with anyone. He took it with
him even after he finally succeeded in finding his way to the
other side of the painted walls. Anisi’s whole existence had
become obsessed with his need to deliver those letters to
Angelina Driza. The process had become so routine that only the
people accustomed to receiving their mail at a certain hour as
usual became suspicious of the delays. With time, the delays
became more frequent and the delivery more disorderly. Some
began to receive their mail even during the night. “Don’t blame
it on me,” the postman would reply to their reproaches.
“Petition the town officials to retouch those black faces on the
walls of each alley, so that I can find my way out of them more
easily, without having to deal with so many additions and
subtractions.”
With that answer, the whole village became convinced that
Anisi had fallen into the trap of mixing numbers and was unable
to find his way out of the imaginary maze. “It is time to give
the postman other responsibilities,” answered the mayor in
response to the one thousand signatures on the petition
delivered to him by the people of Sheshi one morning as he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 33
entered the café and saw them discussing the affair. The fact of
the matter was that those people present at the meeting had no
recollection of the postman at all. After much rambling, they
had not been able to agree on what he looked like or even where
he lived. But most had signed the petition to avoid being
inconsiderate of the town’s elders and out of a desire to
continue on with their card games.
Indeed, the mayor himself soon after had to look through
boxes of old photographs to recognize and identify those who had
delivered the petition for the postman’s dismissal. The next
morning, immediately after his usual cup of dark coffee and two
dried figs, the mayor, with the petition in hand, walked
straight to the post office. Wearing as stern a look as he could
muster, he firmly announced to the postmaster: “I have here a
petition signed by the citizens of this town demanding that you
dismiss the postman at once for failing to deliver the mail at
the proper hour.” The postmaster looked a bit puzzled but not
surprised. “Mr. Mayor,” he replied, “we no longer deliver mail
to people’s houses. Machines that light up with different colors
fill the screen with messages and deliver them before we even
have time to think about it. The last man to deliver the mail
sits right there next to the cast iron stove. I myself cannot
recall the date of the last mail delivery.” Floored by that
response, the mayor directed his eyes towards the minute figure
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 34
of a man who sat like a cricket next to the stove. He had to
search through many layers to look into the mirror of his eyes
to realize that he had never seen that image of a man before.
Rushing home, the mayor spent the next four years looking
among the piles of memorabilia that had been left by his great
grandmother for the photograph which would identify the last of
the postmen, he with the mirrors in his eyes. With the patience
of a watchmaker, he set aside those photographs that most
resembled the old man. Wrapping them carefully in thin paper,
the mayor went down to the ends of the village to consult with
its two eldest people. They were sisters-indeed, identical
twins. They were similar in every detail but for a birthmark on
the left earlobe of one of them. The twins guarded this secret
day and night. Each took turns, every two hours, to defend the
birthmark from the ravages of time. A fresh basil leaf grown
expressly for this purpose was applied on the discoloration
before sunrise and after sunset. The mayor knew through
inaccessible memories that he was in the right house. “An
irresistible aroma of basil will lead you to their home,” his
chair-ridden mother had told him before he left the house.
It was a rainy day. It had rained for days, making the
descent down to the homes carved from the volcanic deposits at
the bottom of the village difficult and uncertain. The streets
became narrower and more tortuous, with each winding into the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 35
next ever more confusedly, particularly since each street looked
very much like the previous ones. In his hurry, the mayor had
forgotten to take down the lantern from its customary spot on
the wall of the dispensary. The distant howling of the dogs
roaming through the village filled him with deep, lacerating
fears. But the flies buzzing so close to his ears between the
raindrops urged him to go on.
His mother had told him to look for a house carved from
pink volcanic stone and surrounded by a perpetually green
garden. Holding his photographs tightly in the inside pocket of
his coat and led by a flock of yellow-breasted birds, the mayor
found himself in a well-lit open space lined with almond trees.
He barely recognized the cone-shaped green leaves laden with
dust because the incessant rains had turned their veins into
rivers of tears. But he shortly became aware of the centenarian
cries that found their way out of the deep fissures of the
earth. At that moment he remembered having heard, while sipping
his coffee in the café and paying little attention, of the
ageless trees that grew at the end of the village. Now a strange
force kept him from getting close to the center of the open
space. He could not feel the pebbles beneath his feet, nor could
he hear the usual irregular heartbeat that pounded in his chest.
“Is this what they mean by death?” he asked himself. And, in
fact, he had reached the road where all roads become one.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 36
Awakened from their mutual dream by the presence of the
stranger, the sisters put on their mantles and tried to open the
door to their cave. This was not possible to do by hand. They
had to break the rusted lock with a hatchet only to find a
second, heavier lock which their father had placed on the
outside before he had set out on horseback to reclaim his lost
childhood. Peering through the hole left for air in the front
wall, the twin sisters saw the stranger as lifeless as a freshly
cut tree branch. “Touch the almond tree with your fingers,” they
advised.
The mayor felt the weight of their voices opening the veins
of his body and, with an uncontrolled lazy movement, his arm
lifted until he touched the wet bark. At that moment every stone
on the road took its own place. The door to the cave opened
effortlessly and the two sisters, hardly able to stand, muttered
a few unintelligible sounds. “We have been waiting for you,”
they said together in one voice. But the mayor could not make
sense of their greeting. “Have we changed so much in this
village?” he pondered as he struggled to hold on to the smile he
had directed at the two women. In their chain of years, the
sisters had devised their own line of communication and had
never tested it out on anyone outside their home.
The mayor, realizing the futility of fusing his own sounds
with those of the twins, proceeded to show them the neatly
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 37
arranged photographs that held the untold events of the founding
of Sheshi. The photographs brought to life the images of the
people watching the twins’ father dig into the earth and plant
the first almond seed. “I shall come back to the village when
the tree will bear its first fruit,” he had told the crowd. “And
I shall send word through the copper wires hiding high among the
trees. There is one among you who shall harvest the message
inside the chestnut grove and will let it be known to the rest
of the people.”
He was referring to a young child, just three years old,
balancing upon his father’s shoulders. That child began the
search for the unwritten word as soon as he was able to make
sounds and words inseparable from each other. From that moment
on, the child was called “Anisi.” At a tender age, he had
already filled his corner space at the house with all kinds of
signs carved into the volcanic stone wall. At night the signs
moved in and out of his mind, always looking for different
considerations. The windows remained tightly shut, the doors
locked and every crack in the walls sealed so as not to lose any
of the sounds. A few years later, Anisi discovered without
fanfare a way to trap the sounds running from inside the copper
wire playing hide and seek among the tree tops. He transferred
the sounds on a golden needle that tapped invisible words on a
silver plate. Anisi gave his discovery a name-“telegraph”-
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 38
explaining to the people of the village that the word meant
“crooked lines” and that their origin was from somewhere beyond
the seven mountains.
Soon Anisi’s corner space inside the one-room home was
proclaimed a shrine revered for connecting the village with the
unseen world beyond the mountains, and Anisi was acknowledged to
be the sole interpreter. This was the birth of the post office.
Shortly thereafter, a row of almond trees was planted to provide
shade for the hundreds of people who daily lined up to receive
news from their loved ones. Mothers washed and cooked outside
their homes waiting to hear the first sounds of the silver
plates that would bring any sign that their sons and husbands in
faraway lands were still alive. It was then that Anisi decided,
with much difficulty, to deliver the messages directly to their
homes as he received them.
At first Anisi spent hours decoding and interpreting the
messages for the women. But this soon became too great a task as
messages began to fill the silver plate with greater speed and
an increased sense of urgency. Anisi wasted no time in sharing
the secrets of the sounds and their many combinations with all
the mothers in the village. He did not bother to summon the men.
They were too busy in the fields, clearing the land for seeding
and dreaming of the biggest harvest ever. Besides, Anisi knew
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 39
that plants had another system of sounds that could not be
mingled with those inside the copper wires.
Among the women who attended the regular midday gatherings
with Anisi was Anastasia, the mother-to-be of the twin sisters.
But she rarely paid attention to his explanations of the minute
details of sound formations. Instead, her mind floated out of
the house of the copper wires, through the ceramic tiles, and
ended up on the bell tower of the old church on top of the hill,
where many years later, unbeknownst to anyone in the village,
the first train was to pass. Anastasia came to realize that
inside the bells lay the secrets of those sound arrangements.
She wasted no time in sharing her discovery with the begetter of
the telegraph. “How is it that things are always revealed by
chance?” Anisi exclaimed to himself. Yet, he himself was in no
hurry to share Anastasia’s findings with anyone else. Indeed, he
dismissed her from the group for being inattentive and given to
reverie. “Go and play house in the fields of clay below the hill
of the three dolls,” he admonished.
It was in these multicolored clay slopes that Anastasia
returned to her childhood. Day after day, her fingernails
bleeding, she scooped out the clay needed to build houses with
unending rooms and cherry-colored furniture. She even contrived
to build a dollhouse similar to one she had heard of once,
although she could not recall exactly where or when. In just a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 40
short time, without anyone’s noticing, Anastasia perfected the
art of making clay figurines. She was even able to violate the
laws of gravity, for some of them stood erect, others leaned to
the left or the right, and still others lay all flat in the air.
Anastasia relived her childhood in and out of the bamboo
dollhouse until one day she could no longer hide within the
hollow stems. Instead, she found herself on the bell tower of
the church on top of the hill by simply closing her eyes.
It came to pass one early afternoon, while she was setting
the clay figurines directly under the sun so as to dry them
naturally, that a raggedy-shaped man, approached, moving with
great difficulty and leaning on a knotted cane. He sat on a
stone stool of the house and asked for a bowl of water.
Anastasia turned at once toward the clear, discerning voice and
was amazed to see the image of an uncertain face. Behind the
stranger’s eyelids she saw all her figurines dancing with
bouquets of flowers in both hands. Anastasia’s entire body went
into convulsions, with every bone resetting into its proper
place. In the morning Anastasia awoke to find herself in the
last corridor of womanhood.
The two spent much of the winter waiting for the high winds
to abate. And as the first sign of green appeared on the eastern
side of the horizon they loaded the mule with all the figurines
neatly packed and set out to reach the small settlement of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 41
Albanians on the other side of the blue ridge. The long arduous
climb through the narrow mountain passes and the cold
temperature of midnight broke into countless pieces all of the
delicate figurines, with the exception of two. These Anastasia
placed in a sack between her breasts because they would not fit
with the rest. It was there, sustained by the warm milk dripping
from Anastasia’s swollen breasts, that the two figurines began
to look for the rays of the sun. Bewildered, Anastasia asked her
guard how this had come to pass, but the old man, now more a
shadow than an image, gave no answer. Anastasia cared for the
two inquisitive figurines with all the tenderness of a young
mother. And in their many years of traveling around the seven
mountains, scorched by the midday sun, buffeted by the evening
winds, or soaked by nightly downpours, they never lost hope of
finding the promised cave that led to the Albanian outpost.
It was, in fact, through their few glimpses of the moon
that they counted the months and the years. These they recorded
with a twist of a knife in the bark of a giant fig tree
carefully guarded from the inclemency of the seasons by two
curved mountain slopes. At times the travelers felt they were
moving in circles, for both seemed to remember a spot even
before they reached it. But neither could be totally certain,
because the colors of the tree leaves kept changing with the
flow of the wind.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 42
“I shall dig for the cave under that ant hill,” the old man
told Anastasia as they rested under a cypress tree. It brought
Anastasia relief to hear him speak for the first time since she
had seen him that remote afternoon when she had been unable to
tell whether he was a child or a grown man. She immediately
traced the sounds that had emanated from his mouth to those she
heard from the bells of the chapel on top of the hill in Sheshi.
With the cave carved from the volcanic ridge with an
entrance and an opening at the top, the old man and Anastasia
began to feel like a family. A small wheat field along the
winding brook basked beneath the afternoon sun. Day after day
Anastasia gathered all that she could find and added it to the
picket fence she busily built during the night. It was to guard
the perpetual vegetable garden from everything around except the
sun and the frozen raindrops which came without warning. Without
the knowledge of the old man, Anastasia thought of sharing the
secret of the sound from the church bells with her two
figurines, whom she called “my twin daughters.”
It was not long after that the old man realized that the
women were communicating in a language unknown to him. Without
making an effort to decipher the strange sounds he decided to
prepare his departure. He felt an indefinable pain, one he had
never before experienced, which made knots in his throat. He
walked to the wheat field along the brook, took the almond seed
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 43
from beneath the moist earth and summoned everyone from the four
horizons to his side. “I shall leave with the early rays of the
eastern sun to search for the well that nourishes the sounds of
the bell tower on top of the hill, and I shall return when this
almond seed shall grow into a tree and bring forth its first
fruit. Listen to the sounds inside the copper wires, for in them
my homecoming shall be announced.” Among those in the crowd,
their heads lowered and filled with fright, there was one child
whose innocent smile was to accompany Girovago on his never
ending search for the origin of sound.
The mayor had listened with stupefaction to this story told
in perfect harmony by the twin sisters. He felt the need to go
back to the post office and converse with Anisi in the language
he had heard from the twins. Outside the cave-house dusk had
settled on the almond tree as the black crows kept watch over
the valley from the chimney tops. The mayor of Sheshi could not
remember ever having walked with such ease as he effortlessly
found his way out of the maze of streets by following the
hundreds of lanterns that illuminated his way back to the main
square. The air was filled with a conundrum of perfumes fast
climbing from the trees in bloom in the valley below. The
unseasonable sweet breeze had already invaded the open spaces of
the houses of Sheshi. The ancient fountain in the main square
hummed with the chatter of the women busy with their evening
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 44
wash. But amidst the festive atmosphere of the square and his
own indescribable inner tranquility, the mayor could not make
his presence felt in the place. He tried in so many ways to call
their attention, but to no avail. “How is it that they neither
see me nor feel my hand when I touch them?” he asked. He tried
to scream next, but no sound came from him. When he embraced
them one by one, no one felt his touch. The mayor knew then that
he was a stranger in the village. And what gave further
verification to this realization was his waiting in vain for the
sun to set. It stayed immobile right above the square, where
thousands of white butterflies flew about, and it neglected to
seek a place to set on the other side of the seven mountains.
“This is a strange way to come to the end of the road,” he tried
to whisper to himself. He had not even taken leave of his
mother, nor had he even had time to place the winter blanket
across her knees.
The first and only person in the village who became aware
of the mayor’s death near the cave of the almond tree that
bloomed with every season of the year was Aristi, the owner of
the café. He did attempt to warn the mayor’s mother, but could
not find the entrance to the road that led to her house behind
the faded faces on the walls. It was not long after that that
the body was found, lying as if asleep at the entrance to the
cave. The two young shepherds who came upon it thought at first
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 45
that the person was a stranger who, caught by the late hour of
the night, had fallen asleep on the stone bench enveloped by a
viscous sheet of fog. To the rest of the villagers, the mayor’s
death came as no surprise. For a long time he had not been a
part of them. And they had known that it was just a matter of
time before he would be unable to recognize the road that led to
the village square. Sheshi had fallen prey to long and bitter
winters with less and less wood to burn in the hearths.
Through the empty spaces left by the fallen raindrops on
the window of the train compartment, I saw the smoke from the
distant chimneys climbing lazily towards the clouds. “The clouds
are God’s cradles filled with sleeping angels,” Mother used to
murmur as we cozily sat around the burning olive log over which
the evening meal slowly simmered in its terra cotta pot. As I
looked at Mother, who had not moved at all across from my seat,
I could see the dark blue flow of the blood through her veins.
How impenetrable those people who sat in that small space were
at first glance. Each was locked in his own world, locked
forever in a timeless, unreachable place that no endeavor could
unfold. That interior world was their only line of defense
against the dense darkness outside. It was in the pleasantness
of the fireplace that I began to stitch together, one by one,
the beads of my memories and tie them with the warmth that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 46
emanated from the burning log and the silent loneliness of the
train tracks.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 47
Chapter Two
The heavy breathing of the great grandmother mingled with the
howling wind sneaking in through the cracks of the weatherbeaten wooden door as she stretched the virgin wool freshly
shaved from the belly and back of the sheep. In the corner near
the stable and the fireplace sat the head of the family. It was
the place he took evening after evening, especially during the
winter months when the fields slept, gathering their strength
for the coming spring. There he sat, white woolen fez over his
head, carving a cane with his moon-shaped knife. Great-great
grandfather Ndre Frushtari carried a heavy weight on his
shoulders. He had been carrying it since that fine April morning
when his father, Kristo Frushtari, first called him by his given
name. It was a heavy burden and one that Ndre Frushtari was to
take to his grave, so people said, for it could be seen in the
daguerreotype placed on his marble tomb. From his place in the
corner he maintained an avowed silence, focusing all his
attention upon working the moon-shaped knife on the cane. During
the winter months he carved dozens of canes of different sizes
and shapes, leaving them to dry on the front wall of the
fireplace.
Ndre Frushtari’s story was sung throughout the four corners
of Sheshi and perhaps even beyond the seven mountains. The
oldest of the storytellers of the village maintained that the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 48
event that was to change the life of Ndre Frushtari happened
during the harvesting of the olives between fall and winter. It
was during the early days of November. The rain had begun to
fall lightly over the olive groves. The women of the village had
descended into the fields to begin carefully picking the black
olives without breaking the tender branches. The olive groves
sent silver rays into the sky. The young filled the air with
enchanting songs, hoping to lure the olives from their hiding
places between the silver leaves. The older women thought of the
golden liquid gushing out of the crushed olives soon to fill the
empty jars. For Ndre Frushtari, soon to come of age, no
preparations had been made. He only expected a handshake from
his father, Kristo Frushtari, and the chestnut cane promised to
him by his maternal grandfather, Mitrush Bey. Fall had come and
gone and winter had settled in the house with a cloudless
morning. The trees, already stripped of their few remaining
leaves, reminded Ndre Frushtari of the desolate winter days that
lay ahead. Kristo Frushtari, without looking into his son’s eyes
and with as firm a voice as he could muster, asked Ndre
Frushtari to dress warmly and to pick up the shotgun that he had
placed on the kitchen table. A deeply hidden fear took
possession of the boy’s body. He fastened himself to the chair
with both hands so as not to shame his father. Now Ndre
Frushtari understood why in the dream during the night he had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 49
not been able to find his way back home from the olive grove
after he had filled the wicker baskets with olives and had set
them in a circle under the trees.
“It is time for you to avenge your sister’s honor,” Kristo
Frushtari said to his son as he fixed his eyes on the burning
log in the fireplace. Ndre Frushtari understood immediately what
was expected of him and said nothing. That morning he carried
with him the silent meaning nestled among his father’s words,
but he was not yet aware that he would never again look at his
father’s face. Those solid features that had made him feel so
secure as a child during his many sleepless nights would no
longer be able to dispel his fears.
After finding the cup of coffee which his mother morning
after morning prepared for him before leaving for the fields,
Ndre gathered up the black cape which had been set aside with
his scarf and woolen gloves. His older sister, Hanna, handed him
a double-knotted cloth with a loaf of bread, cheese and a
handful of dried olives. He wrapped the cape about himself and
left the house without uttering a sound, struggling to hold back
the tears which scalded his eyes.
The sky had darkened with threatening, quickly moving
clouds. Ndre took the outlying alleys of the village, trying to
avoid being recognized by any passerby. He was not aware of the
many shutters which had been left ajar that morning, as if
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 50
bidding him goodbye. Behind them, unseen, were the elders of the
village who for generations had witnessed the departures of the
young. They were caught between the memories of the past and the
sense of uselessness of their old age. At the window of the last
house at the end of the village Ndre saw the pallid visage and
scarcely visible smile of Bardha, who was waving a black piece
of cloth. She had waited for hours that morning to wave to him,
for she had a strong premonition that it was to be the last
goodbye. Bardha had managed to get up from the chair by placing
both hands on the window sill. Lifting her left hand to wave the
black cloth had taken all her strength away.
Later that afternoon, the house cleaner would find her
withered away next to a dry bouquet of white lilies. But on that
early morning, Ndre, tormented by an unfamiliar pain in his
chest, did not wave back to Bharda. Her reflection behind the
window glass had blurred with the passing of a dark cloud over
the cobblestone alley. Ndre did not learn of Bardha’s death
until many years later. He vowed never to love anyone else with
the same intensity and itch he felt on his left eye. But what
hurt him the most was his regret for not having accompanied her
to the gates of the Church of the Three Crosses on the road to
the village’s cemetery.
The sun, brighter than usual, emerged from the tallest of
the seven mountains. Ndre positioned himself at the crossroads
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 51
between the olive grove and the end of the village. His hand was
cemented to the shotgun. A quiet drizzle had begun to fall as he
took position behind the olive tree closest to the road. “It
won’t be long before he will come through here,” Ndre murmured
to himself. He was afraid of the stiffness in his hand on the
shotgun. He hardly remembered Abdil, who had offended Hanna and
for whom he now waited. And he lamented his sister’s lot: to be
forever locked within the four stone walls of her room.
Ilía was destined never to learn of the death of her son,
Abdil; the smile he had saved for her during the long days of
winter as he cared for her died within him that early autumn
morning. Ndre thought of the news of the killing spreading like
wildfire through every house of Sheshi. “By evening it will be
the talk of the village in the square of the old fountain and at
Aristi’s café.”
Ndre’s father, Kristo Frushtari, had raised the members of
his family with the strictest rules concerning their honor. He
was not about to break rules which had been handed down to him
by his father and grandfather. Kristo Frushtari had promised
both that he would never deviate from those legacies. Ndre
thought of how little he knew his father. Theirs had been a
fixed relationship, set down by laws that had governed Sheshi
since the time of the first memories. Gripping the grille of the
shotgun even more tightly, Ndre could not recall ever having
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 52
gone against his father’s wishes. Kristo Frushtari’s imposing
look and unwavering posture left no space for anyone to argue
with him. He ruled the household with an iron will, signaling
with glances, not words. Ndre could count on his fingers the few
words his father exchanged with his grandfather during an
evening meal.
“I shall leave for the fields before sunrise,” Kristo
Frushtari had told his wife the night before he handed his
shotgun to Ndre Frushtari. “There is plowing to be done.”
On that day Elena Musa fixed her eyes on the road that her
husband had taken to reach the fields. The fog had cloaked half
of the village and the drizzle had erased the lines of the road.
Elena Musa had begun to put the house in order and to prepare
the evening meal. She set aside the bowl with water for her
husband to wash his hands and face. The two-room house with the
fireplace on the same wall as the door smelled of cooked beans
and lard. This was the familiar evening smell in Sheshi.
While he waited for Abdil to appear, Ndre smelled once more
the aroma of the cooked beans in the fireplace. He saw his
mother placing the dishes on the table and setting the hard
round bread in the middle of it. “Did she know what father
ordered me to do this morning” he asked himself. He would have
expected at least a greeting from her that morning, but Elena
Musa had not even turned her face to him. She had just continued
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 53
with scrubbing, albeit a little harder. Ndre did not dare to
address her in his father’s presence. “I could have told her of
the pain in my knees, deep inside the bones, tearing them
apart.”
Now Ndre’s breathing grew heavier and heavier. The cold,
incessant drizzle hit his face, numbing his cheeks. “I shall get
it over with as quickly as I can,” he vowed with his teeth
chattering uncontrollably. “The important thing is not to graze
him. I must aim straight at his heart and then run quickly
towards the cave of the painted icons.” His father had told him
to bury the shotgun on the left side of the cave where he had
dug a deep hole. “You will see the hole covered with fig leaves
and a few olive branches. And do not leave the other bullet in
the shotgun.” As Kristo Frushtari was closing the door to the
house that early autumn morning, he had reminded his son to look
for a small envelope inside the hole of the cave of the icons.
“In it there is some money that will get you to Naples and then
across the great divide. On the other side of the ocean you will
find work and people who speak like you. Do not trust anyone.
Look deep into their eyes to see the Icon of the Virgin of
Constantinople. One day I shall come to look for you. I give you
my word.”
It was that promise that gave Ndre the strength to lift the
shotgun and aim straight for the heart of Abdil, who bent his
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 54
knees when the bullet penetrated his heart and slowly fell into
the muddy road. Ndre, breathing heavily, rushed to ascertain
that he had not missed the target. He saw Abdil curving his body
like a cat. Ndre felt his pain inside his own throat and he
smelled the blood gushing out of the wound. Abdil’s bulging eyes
seemed to ask forgiveness. Then he smiled from far away and,
with his mouth open, he let go of his last breath. Ndre was to
carry Abdil’s suffocated pleas with him across the big ocean and
through the unending flatlands of the Orinoco. Not one night
would come to an end without his reliving the sound of the
bullet searching for Abdil’s heart and the sadness that covered
his face. The report of the shotgun was like a hammer hitting
Ndre’s head; like the bite of a yellow viper in the heat of
summer. Abdil’s cry as he began to bleed from his eyes
accompanied Ndre wherever he went; even when he was among
throngs of people, the cry never failed to find him.
The night of the killing had turned bitterly cold. The
continuous drizzle turned into ice as it hit the ground. Ndre
waited for the train inside the waiting room, where it was pitch
dark. Seeing no one on the platform, the station master had not
turned on the lights. Fearful of being recognized, Ndre lifted
both lapels of his coat. He stepped onto the deserted platform
and felt the razor-sharp wind that was quickly descending from
the mountain. That night the wind kept everyone at home in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 55
Sheshi, which was just as well, since Ndre could not have anyone
see him. He moved behind the pomegranate tree, which still bore
leaves, and waited. Finally the train came out of the tunnel as
if it had been detained by the fierce winds. Ndre boarded the
steps of the last carriage and then looked from the window to
make certain that no one had gotten on the last evening train
with him. By then people had come from every corner of the
village to the café to get a clearer sense of the event. The
howling of the sheep dogs at the far end of the village was
carried from house to house by the blustery winds. A cold sweat
invaded Ndre as he sat at the far end of the carriage
compartment. He started to tremble all over, yielding to his
fear.
Ndre had never been out of the village. As a child in the
town’s barber shop, he had heard the old men speak of the city
of Naples. He recalled how he had struggled to make sense of
their descriptions and to envision the city streets, the long
docks of the seaport that reached into the center of the bay and
the ships anchored on each side of it, under a carpet of
multicolored lights. He thought of Ramiz, the white-bearded old
man who sat for hours outside the barber shop, telling how he
had sailed on one of those large ships. “You could only move ten
feet at a time inside the ship to avoid getting lost. From the
deck of the ship, constantly slapped by wet winds, to the hull
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 56
were countless cubicles, and in each one there were four beds,
one on top of the other, smelling of clean white sheets,”
recounted Ramiz to anyone who came to sit next to him. Ndre had
drawn closer and closer to Ramiz so as not to miss anything.
“Then,” Ramiz added daily, when the hour on the silver watch he
carried in his front vest pocket reached five o’clock in the
afternoon, “the boat turned into a great fish and sailed into
the night between the stars and the ocean, jumping from one wave
into another just as the clouds do when they come down from the
seven mountains into the fields of Sheshi.”
Ndre, alone and still trembling from the cold and his wet
clothes, would have given anything to find himself again in the
barber shop listening, his heart pounding, to Ramiz’s late
afternoon conversations about the city on the other side of the
mountains. But the feeling of awe and fascination with which
Ndre returned home day after day, after putting the scissors in
order and sweeping the floor of the barber shop, was now
replaced with a feeling of uncertainty and with an
unidentifiable fear. At that moment, Ndre understood the sense
of separation from things which he had felt when he had visited
his great-uncle, who looked out from the balcony waiting for the
sun to set behind the smallest of the seven mountains.
The train conductor passed by the corridor, but he did not
ask Ndre for a ticket. He did not seem suspicious at all. He was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 57
much more concerned about getting information on the state of
the tracks further ahead, between Potenza and Battipaglia. “Have
you heard from the station master in Potenza?” he asked the man
who had been walking behind him with a lantern in his left hand.
“Not a word, but I would be cautious on the crossroad of the
five bridges. The earth there is prone to give way after a few
days of heavy rains,” the other replied.
The conductor moved ahead, leaving behind the lantern’s
yellow glow, which faded slowly in the cold air. “I did not even
have time to look into my mother’s eyes,” Ndre thought once
more. She had been taking care of the dishes and had not turned
around, but she did see his reflection on the glass window. Her
heart had pounded against her chest, raising a lump in her
throat. She was losing another of her children to an ancient
dark force that exacted heavy retribution. “Put your cape on,
the air is chilly and wet this morning,” his sister had managed
to tell him in a confused and unsteady voice. Ndre called to
mind his father’s last words: “Follow the smell of the sea. It
is heavy with salt and it will lead you where the long ships
dock. Tell them you leave no one behind and you wish to go to
the Orinoco region to work. You will be working for the
landowner for two full years before you can demand a wage. They
need young men like you, but do not trust the trees. In the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 58
savannah, they say, trees talk with one another and breed snakes
underneath their roots.”
Ndre struggled to keep the information safe in his mind. He
had to appear certain and determined to the contractors on the
ship. He did not want the officials to see Abdil’s agonizing
death in his eyes. “I told Abdil to forgive me with a soft
whisper in his ear. I realized then that it was not up to him to
grant a pardon with that forlorn look that had already settled
upon his trusting smile.” Little did Ndre know that Abdil had
actually longed for years for that moment to be released from
his tormenting wait. Perhaps had Kristo Frushtari known about
Abdil’s anguish he might have decided not to send Ndre to take
his life as payment for dishonoring his home.
“I will write to Abdil’s mother through Bardha,” muttered
Ndre to himself. “She will read the letter with the colors of
her eyes to Ilía Nati.” From her rocking chair placed outside
the front entrance to her house, Ilía Nati used to watch Ndre
and Bardha as children running after their black dog. Vases of
geraniums lined both sides of the steps, and a small lemon tree
exuded its entrancing scent into the street. The people from the
south end of Sheshi purposely chose that street to reach the
square of the ancient fountain so that they could breathe in the
lemony aroma. Ilía Nati rarely moved from where she sat. She
just stayed there from morning until dusk waiting for Abdil to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 59
return home and sit next to her. People waved at them as they
passed by, but only Abdil returned the greetings.
No one knows how it happened, but one clear spring day,
Adbil’s mother simply could not select her images anymore. Ilía
Nati sat on the rocking chair and began to follow the scent of
the flowers carried on the soft spring breeze. Abdil went to the
entrance of the village to summon the soothsayer, her hair
braided into a long single plait. “No,” she asserted the minute
she saw Abdil in front of her cave dwelling, “she is not dying.
She has gone back to where she came from.” But no one in the
village could help Abdil trace that place.
On that day long ago they had found Ilía Nati with an old
suitcase tied crossways with a rope. She must have been sitting
on the wooden bench of the train station for a long time. The
station master noticed her only after the train had left the
station. “Are you waiting for someone to pick you up?” he asked
Ilía Nati in gentle tones. She seemed frightened and pale to
him, more a child than a grown woman. She wore a shawl around
her head and about her neck. “I was told by the train conductor
to get off at this station and to wait for the person whose name
appears on the envelope,” said Ilía Nati without lifting her
eyes towards the tall figure of the train master. He saw the
envelope in her hand and attempted to read the name written
there, but she would not let go of it. “He will know when to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 60
come for me,” she mumbled, still not lifting her head. “I will
have to wait until dusk; the moonlight will direct him to me.”
The trainmaster noted the strong determination in her
words, but at the same time he could not help smelling the look
of sadness descending from her eyes. It seemed that Ilía Nati
had traveled for many years searching for the village her
grandmother had spoken to her about. “It is a place where the
almond trees in bloom carpet the whole countryside and where the
wind in late fall cradles the black swallows inebriated by the
sound of the church bells.”
Puzzled by the presence of the woman, the station master
forgot to retrieve the mail sack left on the tracks and to turn
off the bell on the front wall of the station. Ilía Nati’s
apparition had upset his balance between the day and the night.
He bid her good day and rushed to his private room to look into
the corner mirror next to the flowering plants. The station
master shivered all over, for the face he was seeing reflected
in the old octagonal mirror was that of his childhood. In the
mirror, he was still wearing his dark school uniform with a
white collar patiently crocheted by his mother in the hot summer
afternoons. He sensed the same separation from his mother as he
had felt on his first day of school. How strange it was for the
station master that he was no longer concerned about checking
the clocks that hung in the room, each set to the arrival of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 61
trains. He felt free of the countless additions and subtractions
needed to calculate the exact time. Even the oldest chestnut
trees he saw daily from his window did not sway with the
afternoon breeze. He put his state railroad hat on and went down
to the main office to alert the next station of the railroad
line of the stillness in his own station. He reached the front
door and attempted to push it open, but it moved away from him,
making it difficult to take hold of the knob. He pushed the door
itself with all his strength only to find another door behind
it. He realized that he was trapped inside the cubicle of time
and would never succeed in finding his way out through the
tunnel of doors.
Days later, the station master, whose name died with Ilía
Nati that early morning, was found dead by Adbil’s father, Ymer
Ramat, who had read the instructions of how to reach the train
station. Those orders were found written in the letter held by
the frail passenger who he came to fetch at sunset.
He is to be buried on the east side of the cemetery, next
to his mother,” Ilía Nati told Ymer Ramat as he led the mule
down the rocky road toward his house. The letter, placed in an
envelope and filled with flower seeds, had been written by
Abdil’s father’s friend, with whom he had fought in the long war
inside the icy trenches that seemed never to be free of snow. “I
am sending my youngest daughter to you along with all the flower
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 62
seeds I could gather as we walked back from the snow fields of
the steppes. She will keep you company and will take care of the
garden for you.” The letter was signed “Ortensi Nati.”
Ymer Ramat took good care of Ilía Nati for she often
reminded him of her father. They had walked many a mile together
sharing the fear, the cold and the confusion of the war until
they simply had forgotten who the enemies were. “Yes, war is a
terrible thing,” Ortensi had often told Ymer as they huddled
together under the woolen army blanket, “because you don’t know
why you are told to kill.” Many times, after the war, Ymer Ramat
recalled the night when the soldiers in black uniforms had come
to take him along. They had driven for three nights and three
days before they could find Sheshi. Ymer Ramat found himself in
the company of so many people who could barely understand one
another. It was then that he had met Ortensi Nati, much older
than he, with a forehead full of wrinkles and almond-shaped
eyes. Their duty as soldiers was to relay messages from one
trench to another. They never did have a chance to look directly
into the eyes of any other soldiers, who just stood there
motionless, their boots sunk into the mud and their hands
cleaved to their guns.
As the war dragged on, Ymer and Ortensi began to notice
that on the other side of their trenches there was no one to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 63
receive the messages. “Just leave them on the table,” they were
told. “Someone will come by to read them.”
One night, under a moonless sky, they could not find their
way back to their compound through the trenches, which seemed to
have multiplied. In them, the mud and the stench from coagulated
blood covered every possible indicator of the way back. “I think
everyone has gone away,” said Ortensi. “Tomorrow at daybreak, we
shall walk away from this stench and search for the road that
will take us back home.”
And so it came to pass that early the following morning,
as soon as the sun had crystallized the snow, Ymer and Ortensi
gathered whatever food and water canteens they could find and,
without stepping on the frozen bodies, half-ice and half-mud,
they walked toward the horizon where the sun had risen. At night
they slept inside the still warm bodies of the dead horses. The
road back was filled with soldiers who did not have time to
scream.
“There is nothing more precious and at the same time more
dispensable than one’s life,” Ortensi Nati reminded Ymer Ramat
as they stopped at midday, trying to harvest the water dripping
from icicles. Quite often, Ymer Ramat did not understand Ortensi
Nati, but he realized that his companion saw in things what he
himself could not see. Thus, Ymer followed and obeyed Ortensi in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 64
everything, lending his youthful strength to his friend’s
efforts to find the way back home.
The two walked for weeks, months, and years feeding on
every root Ortensi could find. Many a time they had to hide from
other wandering soldiers whom they could not identify as friend
or foe because all their uniforms had become indistinguishable.
All these men were escaping an invisible pursuer in the snowy
fields, one which made terrible noises as they drew closer and
closer to the front lines.
Once an old farmer found Ortensi and Ymer sleeping in his
barn underneath his two cows and realized immediately that they
were not the enemies of his people. They were part of that
company of soldiers whom he helped to bury with a smile on their
faces. He fed the wanderers with the little he could scratch
from under the earth. They spoke very little, mostly through
gestures, that night, and in the morning, the farmer hid them in
his cart under a pile of freshly cut wood and helped them to
cross the river.
There, on that late afternoon, Ortensi and Ymer saw the
long line of soldiers, all without weapons, being ferried from
one side of the river to the other on makeshift boats. “The war
is over,” whispered Ortensi. Ymer did not answer for fear of
having misunderstood. He simply grasped Ortensi’s hand and held
it tightly in his own. It was at that moment that Ymer relived
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 65
his old desire of having a son. “Now you can go back home and
start your own garden, and when you are able to produce enough
in all the four seasons, you may even think of having a family.”
Ymer Ramat never forgot those words, and as soon as he got
back to his village he began to save as much as he could so that
one day he could have his own vegetable garden and even search
for a companion. Ymer never lost hope that his one-time war
friend would cross the seven mountains to visit him. And so,
when they came to his field to summon him to the train station,
Ymer knew that it was Ortensi who had arrived to spend his last
years with him.
At the train station, Ymer paid no attention to the tiny
woman sitting in the waiting room with the tightly tied suitcase
until they exchanged a rapid glance. Then Ymer was startled to
see Ortensi’s smile and his almond-shaped eyes. Yet, he had time
neither to ask her name nor to inquire about her father; she
simply handed him the letter she had gripped so tightly
throughout her long journey and made preparations to leave with
him. Ymer Ramat saw Ortensi’s name written on the envelope, but
he did not bother to read the contents of the letter. “We can go
home now,” he told her as he lifted the tiny woman onto his
mule. “I shall read the letter tonight as we sit at the dinner
table.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 66
Ilía Nati, the youngest daughter of Ortensi Nati, felt a
strange pain in her chest as the mule followed the narrow
downhill road towards the center of Sheshi. In the distance she
saw the half-carved hills, ragged with outcroppings of stones
and sand. The air was laden with dust descending towards the
village. Here and there scattered trees and prickly bushes
struggled to cling to the dry earth. Just beyond a tall pine
tree, Ilía Nati could see the village, each house embracing the
other and at times even sharing the same red-tiled roof and the
same chimney. Only the crisp red tiles distinguished the roof
tops from the whiteness of the horizon. It was then that Ilía
Nati understood why her father had given her the sunflower
seeds. “Take good care of them,” Ortensi had told her. “They
will make you feel less lonely.”
Ilía began to feel dizzy as the road became steeper. A strange
inner trembling had settled in her spine, but she tried to
dismiss it. “It is probably from the long trip,” she thought. At
that point she could not know that the pain would one day climb
up through her back and settle right behind her neck. That
happened when the dust from the gravel pits settled firmly on
the morning dew, slowly withering all the sunflowers that Ilía
gently planted and watched growing in pots on the steps leading
to her new home.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 67
Ilía Nati’s arrival in the village filled everyone with
childlike curiosity. Her beauty, they commented, was a field of
red poppies intensely reflected against the yellow wheat fields
that surrounded Sheshi. The town’s one schoolteacher took her
pupils to the front door of Ilía’s home just to observe the
different colors that emanated from her face. The inhabitants of
Sheshi were convinced that they had been sent an angel.
Ilía Nati began to shine even more brightly from a distance.
When caught by nightfall, the villagers followed that shiny glow
nestled on the town’s tallest hill to return home. No longer did
they fear being swallowed by the darkness. People walked boldly
through the streets, feeling sheltered by the light. The old men
sitting on the wooden benches of the village square smoked their
pipes at late hours while watching the children chasing
lightning bugs. At a special town meeting called by the elders
to discuss the strange illumination bursting forth from Ymer
Ramat’s house and saturating everyone who gazed at it with vigor
and strength, they decided unanimously to rename the village.
“From now on,” decreed the nine elders, “the village will be
known to our people and to all the strangers passing by as ‘Dili
Sheshit.’”
Ilía Nati became even brighter and more ethereal as she
approached her ninth month of pregnancy. The road that came from
behind the seven mountains filled with strangers coming from
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 68
near and far, even from places whose names had hitherto been
nothing more than locations mentioned around the fireplace
during the long winter nights. The travelers set up their tents
wherever they could find an empty space. Some even brought with
them their farm animals. The women, especially, wanted to be
present at the birth of Ilía’s child. They recounted daily their
own experiences in delivering babies, with the hope that someone
would ask them for their help. They even lined up to expose
their breasts, swollen with milk and ready to be suckled by the
hungry newborn.
Never before, for as long as anyone could remember, had there
been so many strangers with so many ways of speaking and
dressing camped around Dili-Sheshit. Their presence assured
everyone in the village that other people, different from them,
actually lived beyond the seven mountains and the distant blue
horizon. Dili-Sheshit was to change forever with everyone caught
in its vortex. The dreams that old Viti daily recounted to his
friends sitting under the warm sun in the village square as they
waited for the children to come and swirl around them was no
longer the fanciful story to which everyone had listened
halfheartedly in order not to offend him. “In my dreams,” Viti
related, “I see a sandstorm rushing down from the seven
mountains with an enormous fireball of light clearer than the
light at dawn. Its rays blind everyone and the doors to the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 69
homes are shut. The eyes finally recede into the darkness to
avoid total blindness.”
The people who daily sat next to Viti thought that he was
getting ready to search for the blue horizon on the other side
of the seven mountains. But days went by and Viti continued to
occupy the same seat on the wooden bench and waited for his
companions to arrive and for the children to follow the flight
of the swallows seesawing with the sound of the church bells
until sunset. Not long after, Viti began to walk behind each one
of his friends’ funeral processions, accompanying them up to the
small church carved under the mountain and then to their final
resting place.
One clear autumn day Viti found himself sitting all alone on
the square’s wooden bench. The few trees that lined the open
space in front of the marble fountain had shed all their leaves.
A gray cloud enveloped the church bells, and the swallows no
longer swirled around them waiting to catch their sounds. Viti
thought he would return home and sit next to his fireplace.
There he would have time to reorder his pictures, identifying
them with a date and a place on the back. Viti had not noticed
the light shining more brightly than ever in Ymer Ramat’s house.
That night Viti forgot to put out the fire burning slowly in
the hearth. He struggled to lift himself up from the small chair
his grandfather had built for him from wild sugar canes.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 70
Everything inside the house seemed to have switched places, and
the copper pots hanging on top of the mantel made strange
noises. One of his legs was completely numb by the time Viti
reached the bed and fell supine upon it. The personal objects
that had kept him company for so many years as a widower were
fading away before his eyes.
At the window pane the lonely figure of his beloved wife was
slowly approaching the bed. The sense of guilt and the old
secluded pain of that rainy November day he could no longer
hide. He recalled the people of the village following in silence
behind as he carried the body of his wife with the rope still
wound around her neck. Viti had found her hanging from the fig
tree, her eyes still open and gentle. The beauty and serenity of
her face would remain forever with him as he shared a few tears
with her during the long winter nights. Viti still blamed
himself for her death. “I should have known what she was
thinking. Why was I so blind to her fears?” Hënza (as he alone
called her) no longer had been able to see her five children go
hungry. Viti worked long hours, at times late into the night, as
a shoemaker. He was a good shoemaker for the people of Sheshi.
But to get paid, he would have to wait until the people could
sell their yearly harvest of grapes and olives to the merchants
who came on the long trains. The people of Sheshi waited
anxiously to hear the whistle of the train approaching the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 71
station on top of the hill. For weeks, the peasants spoke of
nothing else but the money they would get for their fare. The
café smelled of smoke and dreams. While sipping their black
coffee, the farmers nurtured thoughts of acquiring more land and
increasing the yield from the crops. They had heard from the
news brought to the village by the copper wires of the demand
for wine and oil in faraway places unknown to them. Young men
dreamed of having their own family. The ones who seemed to read
their dreams better than anyone else were the old-timers who sat
by themselves in the corner of the café, careful not to take
more space than was needed. They knew full well that too much
water under the bridge would wash the bridge away. But this was
not the time to diminish the joy of the harvest.
Yes, the train never failed to arrive; but with it also came
the autumn rains. The grapes, neatly packed in wooden boxes,
were carefully guarded by members of the family who would each
take turns in displaying their produce to the faraway buyers.
Tall and precisely dressed, the latter moved from box to box,
checking each with the dexterity of an old gambler. Surveying
each pile took days, and the rains did not stop. The peasants
had no inkling that these foreigners, who never addressed them
by name nor even looked at them, were deliberately stalling. The
crafty buyers delayed just long enough for the grapes to lose
their luster; then they offered the meager price per box that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 72
shattered all the dreams fastened together in the café. No
peasant dared not to go through with the deal, no matter how it
disappointed, and the buyers knew all too well that they had
left the farmers with no choice. The latter were even reduced to
fighting among themselves to dispense with the grapes which they
had so meticulously grown and maintained. At night they would
vent their frustrations at the café to one another. “But who
would buy our grapes and olives if we refused to sell them to
the foreigners?” It was the talk of many a night.
In the corner, Zelmi sat chewing tobacco nervously as he
listened to the peasants’ complaints. He had traveled to the
North from where the merchants came, and he had lived among them
for many years. “Long enough,” he reminded those who gathered
around him trying to fathom the image of the big cities of the
North which he described. “You must learn their tactics and do
things the way they do and then fight them with their own ploys.
They need our sweet grapes to mix with their own bitter ones.
Without your grapes they won’t be able to sell their own wines
to their distant markets. You have to form farm cooperatives to
sell your produce at one fixed price. Remember, the northern
merchants must buy from you.”
But the farmers were instinctively afraid. They would think of
the worst that could befall them if they were unable to sell
their grapes and olives. “Who will feed our children if we
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 73
refuse to sell them?” Fruitlessly, Zelmi described in detail the
necessity of forming a group of responsible leaders who could
create and collect funds to provide assistance to the peasants
in times of need. He knew that centuries of persecution and
enslavement by the big landowners had conditioned the peasants
to mistrust anyone who would attempt to make them believe that
they could help themselves. Though the talks went on for weeks,
they were forgotten as soon as each of the peasants eventually
sold his yield, happy, for the time being, that no one would
truly starve. “The next harvest will certainly be bigger and
better,” each promised himself. “Perhaps different buyers will
come to the train station offering higher prices for our own
sweet grapes.”
The anger that filled Zelmi’s gut found an outlet only in
Viti’s shoe shop. “This village is going to rot if these
peasants don’t stand up to the buyers from the North.” Viti
would let his visitor talk without interfering. He knew he was
right, but he dared not reveal it to him for fear of creating
false hopes in the young man. Zelmi was a distant relative of
his wife, and Hënza cared for the young Zelmi as if he were her
own son. It was out of respect for her that a few of the
peasants would hire him during the harvest.
With the little he
earned, Zelmi was able to get through the winter. Spring brought
great relief to him. That was when he began to make preparations
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 74
to cross the big snowy mountains of the North in search of work.
He joined hundreds of other men sneaking through the guarded
passes late at night and feeding on roots before finding work on
the farms of the high mountains. “I never stepped off the farm
until the proprietor, whom I could scarcely understand, told me
that it was time to return through the guarded passes.” Viti
knew that whenever Zelmi returned to Dili-Sheshit a year had
almost gone by. “The owner of the farm gave me an envelope which
contained my wages for the nine months of work and enough food
to last for two or three days. Not a word of gratitude or even
the faintest smile came from him.”
Zelmi was never able to explain to himself how the people
across the tall snowy mountains that they called “the Alps”
dealt with one another. He could not even fathom if they spoke
with one another in their strange language. “I was not permitted
to get close to the owner’s house nor venture
from the farm,
because I could not be seen by the local authorities. I would do
most of the work at night and hide in the barn during the day
until dusk.” Viti’s eyes filled with tears as he hammered the
leather and listened to Zelmi recall the years he had spent away
from the village. “Look at us,” Zelmi shouted. “We are condemned
to live worse than donkeys and to work only to enrich those who
already have more than they need!” Hours would go by in these
conversations until it was time to close the shop.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 75
“Tomorrow will be another day. Perhaps someone will remember
to pay us for the service rendered,” Viti would tell Hënza when
he returned home with some dried beans and a cup of wheat flour.
Viti walked home from his shop smiling at all the passersby with
the hope that they would pay for the shoes he had fixed for
them. Those who saw the sadness in his eyes gave him whatever
they could spare of the food they had saved for the winter. The
rain fell gently, filling the streets with the silence of
autumn. The lights seen from far away moved soundlessly into the
olive groves, searching anxiously for a place to hide.
In the café, Zelmi sat all alone, pretending to read the
yearly gazette that had made its rounds for the full four
seasons. Boredom and hunger were making their presence felt.
Unable to hint at how much he would enjoy spending the night
next to Irena’s fireplace, he just watched the bartender, who,
in turn repeatedly washed the same few cups as he observed Zelmi
tending the seeds of loneliness. The latter looked as if he were
waiting for someone else to come in, but the cold night and the
thick fog were keeping everyone at home. In the corner, Zelmi
was pondering his next trip to the North. The village had become
too estranged from him, and a sense of disaffection and
alienation was taking complete control of him.
Winter had come to stay. The houses, like so many beehives,
shut their doors for months. Zelmi could only smell the smoke
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 76
coming out of the chimneys as it pointed with intentional
destruction towards the massive gray clouds. The few books he
possessed became his devoted companions. He was careful not to
squander the few pieces of wood he had scavenged, so his oneroom home was barely warm.
Now the cold reminded Zelmi of those long, icy nights when his
mother, seeing how he trembled, begged her neighbor to let her
pale little boy sit next to her fireplace. “He won’t take much
space; he is so frail.” Irena, who could feel the pain in
Zelmi’s mother’s eyes, could not refuse her request. In fact,
Irena asked her husband, Aurelio, to build a seat for the little
boy from the wild sugar canes that grew along the hidden brook
that traversed their plot of land. For years to come, Zelmi kept
that chair next to the fireplace along with the two books that
Aurelio had given him, commenting “Here, we won’t need them
where we are going.” Those words descended into the realm of
memories destined to be kept alive by the clear waters of the
underground rivers.
To the rest of the people of Sheshi, the departure of Irena
and Aurelio with the few belongings they could claim as their
own seemed to have faded away with the passing of each
successive winter. Zelmi had been no more than nine years of age
when Irena and Aurelio received from their son, who was born
with the clearest eyes and glistening red hair, a letter urging
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 77
them to join him in a place he called Australia. “The land is so
wide and has the color of our red grapes. The natives say that
there is no end to it because no one of their people has ever
seen the horizon,” he wrote. “Here there is no snow, plants grow
by themselves, and rabbits are as abundant as fireflies in the
sultry summer nights.”
Love for their only son convinced Irena and Aurelio to
undertake the journey on one of the long sailing ships they had
seen advertised on the front walls of the town hall. “Come and
sail on top of the ocean towards paradise,” read the
announcement adorned with strange flowers and fruits being eaten
by sheep standing on two legs with their young in pouches
growing out of their stomachs. “I have a feeling that in that
place we won’t have to break our backs to grow our vegetables
and fruits. There is so much to have that they even allow the
sheep to graze on them.” This is what Aurelio repeated to his
wife night after night as she struggled to detach herself from
all that had been hers and from the memories of her dead
relatives. What convinced Irena in the end, however, were not
the strange flowers and animals in those colored posters on the
wall of the town hall, but a deeply concealed feeling that her
son was suffering from loneliness.
Early the next morning, under the thick mist that had
descended from the seven mountains overnight, Zelmi accompanied
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 78
the couple to the train station. He still could feel the wet,
penetrating cold of the morning when he embraced them for the
last time. The bell on the wall of the station signaling the
arrival of the train had opened inner wounds. “Something tells
me we won’t be coming back to Sheshi any more,” Irena whispered
in Zelmi’s ear as she kissed his cheeks. The inner umbilical
cord was torn to pieces. Zelmi felt a deep urge to urinate as
his stomach convulsed uncontrollably.
The train moved as quickly into the tunnel as a tear on a dry
summer’s night. A few years later, while sitting outside the
café during the early evening hours, Zelmi learned of Irena’s
death of an unknown disease. The village priest announced a Mass
to be celebrated in her memory the very next day. It was
attended by everyone in town. They listened to Prefti Vlasi
speak of the terrible sin that some people carry within them
that tempts them to desire more than what God has granted them.
“Be happy with what our Almighty has bestowed upon you. Do not
venture beyond the threshold of your own home, for that is the
call of the Devil,” he shouted as he stood taller than usual on
the wooden pulpit of the Church of the Dead. It was one of those
rare occasions that the priest was not drunk with his own
reveries. The parishioners were enthralled by his inner voice as
he read from the Sacred Book and with trembling hands carefully
placed it on the right side of the altar. Many of the women
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 79
present at the Mass that late afternoon swore by what they held
most holy that they had seen a shaft of light descend over the
body of Prefti Vlasi in the pauses between the words he read
from the Bible.
Rumor had it that Prefti Vlasi had returned to the days of
his youth when he had first arrived in Sheshi, his eyes beaming
with faith and innocence. Even Zelmi had noticed the changes in
the town’s priest, but he had attributed them to Prefti Vlasi’s
desire to unclasp the necklace of time now that Serafina was no
longer there to converse with the saints. It had been her habit,
as she changed the flowers beneath their statues, to entreat
each saint with the same request. “I hope you will let me know
ahead of time when I am going to meet my mother so that I can
prepare myself for the reunion.” Serafina had been knitting her
blue quilt with the yarn that each shepherd in Sheshi brought
her on Christmas night. She used some of the yarn to make a
coverlet for Baby Jesus in the manger of the Nativity scene, and
she saved the rest for herself for her long-awaited trip.
When the village women washed and prepared Serafina for public
viewing in front of the altar, they noticed the blue cloth
glistening with millions of stars, casting a gleam of light on
her pale face. Rome declared Serafina a saint in response to a
long petition sent to the Holy City from every villager who
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 80
witnessed on every clear night the multiple stars shining like
fallen comets on her tomb.
Now Zelmi felt the loneliness lodging permanently in his
bones. Sheshi had fallen into a stupor. Prefti Vlasi abandoned
his duties as a servant of the Church and went in search of his
childhood. One day from the steps of the church, while avoiding
the burning heat of the early afternoon, Zelmi saw Prefti Vlasi
sneak out of the refectory dressed in shorts and a tee-shirt. He
saw him walk towards the fountain of the icy waters at the
entrance to the village. In the pool of water Prefti Vlasi built
dikes and filled them with the water overflowing from the basin.
He had brought many a paper sailboat, which he sailed with the
wind he himself provided by blowing puffs of air. To the people
of Sheshi, Prefti Vlasi was a disgrace. They blamed the Church
officials in that faraway city for not rectifying the
abomination. “Our children will never get to Paradise unless
they are baptized,” the women fussed as they sat outside the
door of their homes knitting and mending. As they watched the
nuns lock the door to the church with heavy bolts from the
outside and the inside, the women resolved to bring their
children into a state of grace and an understanding of the old
ways.
The elders who lived at the end of the village near the
church carved in the rock kept busy making cloth dolls for the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 81
newborn. As soon as they could stand on their feet and search
the sky with their own eyes, the little ones were given a doll
and were taken to the hill above the train station. There stood
a round, grassy place, greener than any other in the lands
pertaining to the village. The ancient grove was surrounded by
uniformly tall cypress trees, and through it ran a spring of
cold, clear water, sweeter than that of any fountain. Called the
“Fountain of Shea,” it was sheltered and protected just as
vigilantly as the Church of the Virgin of Constantinople on the
hill overlooking Sheshi from the side of the nascent sun. There
on a feast day just before sunset the young and the old, dressed
in their best attire, would go to wash their hands and faces, to
slice the watermelon which had been cooled in the waters, and to
gather around the storyteller to listen to the tales of the days
of old.
But, with the arrival of Prefti Vlasi in the village, the
Fountain of Shea was kept hidden in the deepest memories of the
people. No one dared go near it nor mention it by name. The
mothers of Sheshi wanted their children to one day enter the
“Gates of Paradise,” so often mentioned by Prefti Vlasi as he
stood tall on the pulpit of the Church of the Dead. They did not
know exactly where nor how their children would enter these
gates, but they wanted to make certain that they would not be
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 82
excluded from them when they were no longer around to look after
them.
The women of Sheshi never shared these concerns with their
men. They only talked about them among themselves when the men
were in the fields tending to the crops. The division of labor
between the man and the woman was strict and abiding. In the
home, the woman ruled like a queen bee, while growing certain
crops and tending to them was a man’s duty. Sickly as he was,
Zelmi was caught, as he was growing up, between the secretive
world of his mother (whom he followed daily in her house chores
and during her many chats with other mothers of the village) and
the silent, stern behavior of his father, who demanded complete
obedience. So it was that a particular moment which occurred
during the spring festivities at the Fountain of Shea often came
to his mind.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 83
Chapter Three
Zelmi’s mother had spent the long winter months knitting the
sweater and socks that he was to wear during the feast
celebrating the end of his childhood. On the morning of the
event, Zelmi’s mother took her best common pin and placed it on
the heart of the white woolen doll she had made for him. She put
the doll inside a chestnut box and handed it to Zelmi. “When you
reach the top of the hill beyond the railroad tracks,” she told
him, “look for the circular green space. You are first to wash
your hands and feet and dry them with this white cloth. Place
the doll under the volcanic rock and jump over it seven times.
With your eyes closed, find the common pin on the doll and push
it all the way inside the heart. Be certain not to open your
eyes until you can hear the fluttering wings of the butterflies.
You must bury the doll, wrapped within the white cloth, face
down inside the green round space and then retrace your very
same steps returning home. Do not look back, son, until you have
reached the door to our house.”
This was the day that changed Zelmi’s life. Having finished
the rite, he could feel the heaviness of his shoes as he
descended the hill, but he resisted the temptation to look back
at the white butterflies singing ancient lullabies. A cold sweat
began to fall from his forehead, casting a shade over his eyes.
The surroundings, so familiar to him the day before, suddenly
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 84
seemed altogether strange. Zelmi no longer felt part of the
trees gently swaying their multicolored leaves in the wind. Nor
were the sounds and the smell of the wheat fields recognizable
any more. For the first time, Zelmi became aware of strange
cries reaching his ears from the deep precipices at the end of
the village. Around him he saw the white butterflies bitten by
armies of black flies pursuing them inside the prickly desert
flowers that grew under the shade of the pine trees. His knees
almost gave out, and the pain from his legs moved up to his
throat, drying his mouth. A bitter, prickly sensation had
replaced the sweetness of the waters from the Fountain of Shea.
Zelmi’s mother, her eyes frightened and deeply recessed within
their sockets, waited patiently for Zelmi outside the door of
their single-room home. Her heart had ached with a thousand
needles during the never-ending wait on that hot spring
afternoon. She knew that soon she would no longer be able to
claim her son as her own. From then on, he would have to follow
the footsteps of his father and learn the workings of the soil,
the ways of tending seeds, and the process of harvesting in the
late days of summer and autumn.
Zelmi knew everyone in the village. The days for him would
come and go with the heat of the bygone spring and the winds of
fall. He now spent the heavy snowfalls of winter planning his
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 85
trip up North and retelling to himself the legends of the
founders of Sheshi.
For the mother, Alexsa, time was spent waiting for the letter
in the yellow envelope that was to come from the city of the
playful waves clothed by the rumbling volcano. Alexsa had become
the anchor of the family after her husband, Dhimiter, had
decided to seek his fortune across the ocean. He was following
his older sister, who had been sent to America to work as a
seamstress.
Zelmi’s mother had spent days and nights trying to convince
her husband to pay more attention to his children, rather than
falling prey to empty dreams. “Those who have left the village
have all returned empty handed and with deep scars,” she
reminded him. But Dhimiter would not have any of his wife’s dark
premonitions.
“Be close to your mother,” he had admonished Zelmi, who was
the elder of the brothers. The young man stored those words deep
in the recesses of his mind. When sitting alone in the empty
square of Sheshi and before closing his eyes at night, he would
repeat the words so as not to ever forget them. That
responsibility grew heavier and heavier as years went by and his
mother grew more and more dependent on him. He felt ashamed to
go down to the narrow brook below the white cliff to play with
the fish coming up for air from their summer hideouts.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 86
The rainy season that followed seemed especially long to
Zelmi. The village streets, cold and wet from the incessant
rain, kept everyone indoors, so Zelmi could not allow himself to
be seen walking alone from one end of the square to the other.
It was simply not done, unless he wanted to be branded as a
loner. Yet, leaving the house from time to time was the only way
he could relieve his anguish about having to provide for his
family in his father’s absence. “He had no right,” Zelmi would
say to himself as he grew older, “to leave me in charge of the
family.” All the same, there were times that he missed his
father so much that he felt his loss as a heavy pain which would
lodge in his chest for days. Zelmi understood his father’s
desire to undertake the perilous voyage across the dark ocean,
for he too now fought against time, which nestled year after
year inside the clock, rendering everything so monotonous that
it seemed to rob even the air that one needed to breathe.
And still the days dragged on. The people in the café waited
patiently for the rains to break. Aleksa had lost count of the
days that she had been waiting for the letter to arrive from
that faraway place. “The city must be asleep, lulled by the
bewitching sounds of the waves,” she consoled herself.
On
the day of his fourteenth birthday, Zelmi climbed up to the
train station, where he was to join the endless trail of people
going north.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 87
“There,” he had been told, “people pay lots of money for a
haircut and a shave. They never fail to give you even something
extra after you brush the fair from their back.” Zelmi had
learned the trade at Teurini’s barber shop after school hours,
just as every young man and woman learned the trade of their
parents’ choice. The trade usually was passed from generation to
generation. Zelmi had made plans to put his trade to use, save
money and then send for his mother and younger brothers to join
him. For months he had made preparations for the journey to the
North without mentioning a word to his mother because he knew
that she would be against it. The absence of his father had
taken years of strength away from her. Not having her son to
depend upon would certainly close the door to her hope of
keeping the family together.
Of late, Zelmi had noticed that his mother had stopped looking
into his eyes. She had begun to withdraw into her own world.
From time to time
she rearranged the few clothes she had saved for her daughter
since her younger years. In the afternoon she sat next to the
balcony, hoping to relive a bygone image of her husband
returning from the fields. “How long before the clock strikes
five o’clock?, ” Alexsa asked her neighbor who daily came to
have a cup of hot tea with her. The waiting lasted until the sun
dropped behind the smallest of the seven mountains. “There is
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 88
still plenty of time before five o’clock,” her youngest son,
Lini would say, hoping to lessen her pain, so that she could
close her eyes for the night. For it was the fading light of
dusk which allowed the woman to shut her eyes; she opened them
with the first light of dawn, when she resumed waiting for
Dhimiter with the same precision, the same expectations. “She
has gone back to the time of her nuptials,” the neighbor
counseled her children. In Alexsa’s mind, her future husband
stood tall and proud. He had broad shoulders and piercing black
irises surrounded by intense white. Lini learned his mother’s
routine so well that he quickly picked up her secret ability to
weave together the past and the present.
Meanwhile, Zelmi, sitting on the church steps where the sun
shone the brightest, had begun to sense an inner loneliness that
he could not identify. He began to converse with himself, going
back and forth within the tunnel of time that would soon take
complete control of him. A noiseless world that had the colors
of the sunset had appeared on the horizon. Zelmi found himself,
legs crossed, listening to the stories being told and retold
with his eyes wide open. Sheshi had been blanketing during the
night by a heavy snowfall. Each family member took his place
around the warming brazier placed in the middle of the one-room
house in anticipation of the opening of the magic domain. The
slow-burning coal derived from the stumps of wood half charred
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 89
before the onset of winter, in fact, barely kept their feet
warm. But sitting close to one another thwarted the cold wind
slamming against the door. It was the world of the child who
sees no change in the order of things. The convincing,
spellbinding fabric of the stories would assuage them,
distracting them for awhile from the constant, unanswered
craving for food that ravaged the remaining hours of the night.
On the steps of the Church of the Dead, under the searing
afternoon heat that baked the shiny stones as bricks inside an
oven, Zelmi had lost the ability to move from one shore to the
other of the fable land. Hours and hours would go by, but Zelmi
could only notice the movement of the sun from the groves to the
top of the tallest of the seven mountains surrounding the
village. It was, in fact, the gradual cooling of the stones on
the church steps that made him aware that it was time to return
home. The narrow street that led to his house had already been
deserted by the few people who had lingered in the half-moon
square waiting for the evening shadows to envelope the old
marble fountain. It was the hour in which Zelmi would feel the
loneliness that his father had entrusted to him that afternoon
at the train station. The cool evening air triggered in Zelmi’s
body a silent trembling that only his mother would feel as he
entered the house. “Sit next to the fire with the woolen cover
on your knees,” his mother would tell him.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 90
Alexsa sensed the restlessness of her son, and in moments of
lucidity she knew that sooner or later she would not see Zelmi
sitting at the fireplace with his eyes fixed on the burning
olive log. It was only a matter of time before Zelmi would climb
towards the train station to board the early morning train that
would take him to the city of lights that played luminous games
with the wooden poles along its many streets. Alexsa had
attempted many a night to imagine this terrible place that had
lured her husband and now enticed her eldest son away from her
home. It was a force that all her magic was unable to identify,
but she could feel its monstrous strength snatching her family
from her. The few times Zelmi dared to look at her as they sat
next to the hearth, she cautioned, “If you want to leave, it is
best that you not tell your younger brother. He might want to
follow you, and he is not fully grown. Alexsa saw her family
burning away like the few twigs in the fireplace used to start
the burning of the olive stump. She fought the desire curl up
forever under the covers by thinking of the ashes she must save
to give life to the dormant seeds of her garden.
And so it happened, to the surprise of no one, especially not
his mother, that one fine morning before dawn Zelmi kissed her
and his younger siblings and climbed the hill to the train
station without looking back. It was then that the bells of the
clock tower in the square pierced his chest, freeing him of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 91
pain that he had carried with him since that late afternoon when
his father had left to cross the ocean. Little did he know, as
he found the only seat available in the carriage that had
stopped in front of him, that it would be the last time he would
ever look upon his mother’s face. Nor could he know that he
would be unable to accompany his younger brother to his final
resting place beyond the little church carved on the rock.
A few hours later Alexsa, having fallen asleep after dawn,
awoke to a morning enveloped by a thick fog. The air weighed
heavily on the few leaves left hanging on the almond trees by
the wind of the previous night. She had difficulty starting the
fire with the few twigs which she had brought from the pile of
wood stashed outside. A cup of hot tea would give her the
strength to put order to the house. Alexsa intended to dust the
two pieces of furniture left to her by her great aunt and to get
rid of the spider webs that had multiplied in the four corners
of the room. The tiny window that connected the house with the
outside usually brought in just enough light to ensure
visibility, but that morning it shone ever so brightly,
revealing a great mass of steam filled with specks of dust
hovering over the commode and the wide table.
With measured gestures, Alexsa filled her cup with hot water.
The sugar bowl on top of the fireplace mantle was empty, but the
few figs hanging on the string next to the entrance served to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 92
sweeten a bit the tea leaves. They were a good substitute for
the costly granular sugar. It was a cold morning. The white
vapor from the cup could be seen searching for the top of the
room, taller than usual.
Alexsa, motionless, took her customary seat on the chair
placed at the side of the window. This was her way to avoid
forgetting the faces of the villagers passing by during their
daily errands. For the first time she had to struggle to
recognize the passersby. She became convinced that the village
itself had grown old. The girls had streaks of white in their
hair and wore suits designed for the men. But what unnerved her
the most was seeing them walking by themselves, wrapped by a
shawl of loneliness. It was the same feeling of emptiness that
she had carried inside her womb for many years.
Now Alexsa relived Zelmi’s departure, and her eyes filled with
tears. She felt that the outside world was escaping her. She
attempted to lift her arm to motion to the unrecognizable faces
passing by every now and then, but she could find neither the
energy nor the will to do so. Even the memories deep inside her
mind, generally so helpful to her during the long, rainy
afternoons in the past, could not be held together by the rings
of time. No longer able to remember what day it was, she felt
tossed in the air by the wind coming down from the mountains.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 93
It was her younger son’s voice behind her that brought Alexsa
back to her chair. “Zelmi left you a note,” he told her. He had
not read it and it did not occur to him to think that his
brother might have left. To him this was just another day doomed
to pass like all the others with no change.
Lini had always been seen by the family as the young child
fixed forever in that imaginary age that for many stood
motionless. They did not realize that an inner boredom and an
acute feeling of nausea was about to take possession of his
mind. It had started years before during his first day of school
as he took his place in the back of the makeshift classroom. The
school was at the old widow’s house at the other end of the
village. Dhimiter never had made anything of his son’s desire
for isolation, nor had he been particularly concerned by Lini’s
obsessive search for all kinds of seeds to plant, which he
collected from every street of the village. “It is child’s
play,” Dhimiter would say when Alexsa inquired why he would not
play with the neighborhood children. “Let him find his own way
out of it. It is part of growing up.”
The mother, however, felt a terrible premonition. Night after
night she would experience dreadful dreams that served to
increase her fright. She dreamed of her son falling down into a
deep ravine as they were going to her father’s fields next to
the meandering brook to look for any ripe tomatoes to take home.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 94
She believed in the dream, yet she did not have the courage to
share it with her husband. But when she was with her son, she
glued her hand to his, wishing that he might never let go. At
times, she wished she could lock her fingers with his and draw
him back into her womb.
Lini missed his father. His mere presence would have filled
him with strength and a willingness to go to school and to do
well there. He remembered his father’s eyes beaming with
satisfaction in seeing him reading and interpreting passages
from the New Testament. Too young to undertake a conversation
with his father, Lini could not understand that Dhimiter had
left to cross the ocean mostly thinking of a better and more
secure future for his children.
Alexsa would have been happy with the little they had as long
as they could keep the family together. For her, it was useless
to attempt to change one’s destiny and face the forces outside
one’s own village. After all, she thought, they were placed in
the village for a definite reason, and one should not deviate
from it. She had come to realize all that in her own house as a
young girl, but her husband would not abide by that belief. “If
we were to follow our feeling, we would all end up eating hay,”
he admonished his wife every time she advised him not to fall
prey to empty dreams. There was no way she could dissuade
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 95
Dhimiter from leaving Sheshi and going to meet the eldest of his
sisters in the lands beyond the vast ocean.
Not too long after Zelmi’s departure, Sheshi awoke to an
intense heat wave that solidified the air and scorched the bark
of every tree. The flowers turned brown and burned as they fell
to the ground. By late afternoon, the village’s streets lay
beneath two inches of ashes still emitting a foul odor. The
people of Sheshi, blinded by the inflammation of their tear
glands, could no longer distinguish the houses. The trees that
surrounded the village were left bare and deeply scarred. Lini
felt a deep urge to retrace his steps over the carpet of ashes.
He managed to reach the hazelnut grove, which still had a few
leaves, on top of the ravine at the end of the village. He
climbed the tallest of the trees, leaving behind imprints on the
trunk. Days after the fruitless search for him, the villagers
recalled seeing a boy sailing on a gray sailboat, a boy who
would turn into a bluebird with the early rays of the morning
and fly daily towards the sun at exactly midday.
Once again, strange looking people came from far away places
to kneel before the tree that never completely lost its leaves
and which, on the anniversary of the fallen ashes, bloomed with
white-orange flowers in the shape of tiny sailboats. Alexsa
never witnessed this miracle. She did see her son Lini in her
dreams at the bottom of the cliff, weaving sailboats with the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 96
blue grass growing along the hidden brook of the dark waters and
blowing them upward over the branches of the hazelnut trees.
Alexsa preserved in the deepest recesses of her memories the
sound of the dark cool water bubbling out of the small crevices
and making its way toward the cave of the serpent.
In her youth, Alexsa had heard many a version of the origin
of the sacred cave which had the power to change anyone into the
shape most desired. She specifically recalled that one winter
night as she sat next to the fireplace crocheting the pillow
cases of her future matrimonial bed, she had flown with the blue
butterflies that had suddenly appeared on the white threads. But
only after the disappearance of her younger son did those
memories begin to make sense to her. Alexsa had found peace
realizing how nothing dies, how everything that walks in the
distance simply changes into something else to escape the
smothering effects of time. She began to search in earnest for
the past by invoking the spirits of her ancestors who had been
waiting to receive her into the world of never-ending floating
images.
Mitrusha, the widow who lived close to Alexsa, found
her with wide open eyes and a soft smile at six that evening.
Mitrusha had wanted to tell Alexsa of having seen her son Zelmi
on the train that was moving towards the yellow plains. The
sighting was also confirmed days later by a group of workers
going to the tomato fields. The unusual uneasiness that assailed
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 97
Mitrusha on that day compelled her to knock at the door of her
neighbor and even to call Alexsa for the first time by her first
name. Alexsa had had no time to share with Mitrusha the dream in
which she had seen Lini descend into the ravine next to the
sacred cave of the serpent. On that day Alexsa had waited for
hours for Lini to return. He had gone down to the brook to catch
frogs as they came out of the water attempting to snatch from
the moon its first rays of light. “I only saw Zelmi this morning
at a passenger window of the train,” Mitrusha told Alexsa just
before she turned pale. “I recognized him by his sad look,” she
continued as Alexsa turned completely white with deep patches of
grey on her cheeks.
Alexsa was buried quickly in her family’s tomb, which bore
only her name. Years later, no one in the village could remember
Alexsa, and no documentation was ever found in the town’s
municipal building that could attest to her having existed. The
many birth and death certificates had crumbled to dust years
before as the oldest of the clerks dared to stare at them.
On the day of his departure from Sheshi, Zelmi was totally
distracted by his dream of striking it rich in the city of the
North, so he did not sense the imminent closing of his one-room
house as he waited for the train on the station platform. He
stayed in a lone corner of the edifice to avoid being recognized
by any other traveler from the village. Zelmi boarded the train
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 98
at precisely five o’clock in the morning. The train had just a
few carriages. The platform was completely empty. He could have
sworn that the train had no beginning and no end. He moved
quickly from one carriage to another looking for an empty seat.
Zelmi had never seen so many different faces before, nor had he
heard so many strange combinations of sounds from what he
thought was the same language.
Zelmi found a seat in the corridor next to a closed window.
Next to him was seated a dark woman with bright green eyes and
curly black hair held back by a black scarf. Zelmi likened her
to the roaming Gypsies he had seen in the village during the
weekly market day. She had her eyes fixed upon the sea, which
followed the swiftly moving train as it turned and swirled much
as a snake under thick bushes. The stranger’s solemn look
brought to mind his mother’s image. “She will understand why I
had to leave,” Zelmi murmured to himself while following the
crashing of the sea waves against the rocky shoreline. How odd
and callous did the long corridor of the train wagon seem,
filled as it was with strangers glazed in by the silence of
early dawn.
Zelmi wondered if the woman’s intense green eyes
were a reflection of internal images woven with screams of
desperation. His mind rushed uncontrollably through every alley
of Sheshi following the smell of the burning olive logs and
ending at the front steps of the barber shop. He had not had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 99
time to say good bye to Teurini, with whom he had spent many an
afternoon in silence and who had been more than a friend to him.
Teurini had known all along that it was only a matter of time
before the village would lose another young man. It was the
curse that had settled in the village when the ancient memories
had begun to fade.
“Go and see for yourself what is there on the other side of
the seven mountains. It is the only way to be at peace with
yourself. I know you will return as all of us did with our backs
full of memories,” Teurini had told Zelmi the day he saw a deep
emptiness in the younger man’s eyes.
Now Zelmi shivered
with the early frost of the morning as he looked through the
compartment’s window at the branches of the trees along the
tracks bent by the weight of the dew iced during the cold night.
It was a gray morning with deep crevices of silence. Zelmi
shared the pain in the hearts of everyone on that minute train
moving ever so fast towards the promised land. It was a journey
filled with tears and suffocated cries across an endless plain.
“The journey will never end,” Teurini had told him. “It is part
of us all. The sad thing is that we become aware of it when it
is too late to tell our children. And so, the circle becomes
wider and wider and the pain ever deeper.”
The train ride towards the North seemed long and filled Zelmi
with apprehension. He made certain that no one saw him as he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 100
took out the piece of bread and the hard cheese he had put aside
the night before leaving the village. The first rays of the sun
had just reached the window panes from the distant sea,
revealing the tired passengers stretched in so many different
ways in the crowded compartment. He wondered if they knew where
they were going. Although he had carefully written down his
cousin’s address, he clearly remembered having been told by him
how close the barbershop was to the train station of the big
city. While he tried desperately to imagine the place from the
description he had been given, his mind kept going back to his
house, searching frantically for his mother and brother.
He was torn between the need to find a road he could traverse
alone and the trust placed on his shoulders by his father. “I
shall write to them the minute I find my cousin. They knew I had
to leave. I shall send the all my wages, and my mother will be
the envy of everyone in the village.” Yet, Zelmi could barely
convince himself of his wishes. The hours on the train were
making a nest deep inside his gut. For relief, he brought back
to mind Mitrusha’s words to his mother. “Zelmi will be the
shoulders that will sustain you as your husband gathers the
waves from the ocean.” Zelmi’s mother never paid too much
attention to Mitrusha. She could never penetrate the thick veil
that covered the old woman’s face when she came down the steps
and sat on the front stairs of their home. Indeed, Alexsa was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 101
the only one who noticed the invisible shroud on Mitrusha, but
she had never made anything of it. She had thought that it was a
trick of the sun shining on her forehead.
It was clear that now things were settling into their own
places within their own space and time. The hidden force that
moved all things was busy at work, and Zelmi just flowed with
it, for, by now, he realized that all is written in the great
book and one can only try to decipher what has already been told
innumerable times by so many story tellers in the four corners
of the world.
It was his second day on the train. The bare mountains and dry
land of the South gave way to flatlands densely cultivated with
fruit trees. In the evening Zelmi saw a wide river flowing
rapidly among poplar trees. He even saw boats in the shape of
houses with chimneys plying the river freely. This land was
certainly different and densely green. “It must be very easy to
grow all kinds of things with so much water all around it and
the sky filled with rainy clouds,” he speculated. The rest of
the passengers crammed into the compartment seemed to pay no
attention to the lush green that followed the train. Little did
Zelmi know that the others did not bother to look out of the
window because they could not claim any of the land as their
own. They were simply passing by as strangers. Their place, too,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 102
was in the dry and rocky land of the Southern villages they had
left behind.
The train had picked up speed and was sailing effortlessly
through the flat plain. Zelmi, observing the wrinkles in the
sunburned faces of the passengers, aged by centuries of sadness
and solitude, struggled to recall the smell of soft air that
came to Sheshi from the sea in the early hours of the morning.
The travelers spoke with their eyes and uttered no sound. They
feared making a mistake or revealing unappealing gestures. The
young and the old huddled against each other much as the people
in Sheshi did during the long winter days. Zelmi could not help
but discern how similar the children were to their parents. It
was like looking into a mirror where much of the same
combinations were pitted in the cycle of time. There was a bond
between the past and the future that could not easily be broken,
for each drew sustenance from it.
Zelmi was beginning to make sense of much of what his father
had told him at the train station. “Keep the family together
while I am gone. I shall return as soon as I have saved enough
to buy some land to put an addition to our home.” The feeling
that his mother and younger sibling needed him made Zelmi feel
extremely uneasy.
The train had come to a stop at a long station, where many
people were waiting to board. Others dressed in white uniforms
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 103
pushed carts filled with sandwiches and bottles of water. They
urged everyone to buy, for it was the last stop before the final
outpost six hours from now. Of the people inside the
compartment, no one paid any attention to the call. Like Zelmi,
they had counted their money and could not afford such
amenities. Indeed, it had taken years for Zelmi to save enough
money for the trip, and, had it not been for Teurini’s giving
him the money he had originally set aside for a gift for his
wife, Zelmi would never have been able to undertake the journey.
Zelmi dared not look at anyone; nor had anyone in the
compartment uttered a word to him. In a way, Zelmi was glad, for
he would not have known what answer to give them. The world
outside of Sheshi was as impenetrable as the people and the
landscape he was seeing. All that the passengers shared was
their fear of the unknown and the certainty of poverty and want.
Among them there was a deep mistrust as dark as the deepest
caves underneath the seven mountains. Behind their remote faces,
there was a tightly restrained anger…a spark as yet incapable of
igniting the fire which could only bring down the edifice that
crated the monster devouring all their efforts to provide for
their families.
Little by little a feeling of malaise took hold of Zelmi’s
body. Nauseous from the bouncing of the carriages upon the
tracks, he wished to leave the compartment and breathe a little
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 104
of the air that was coming in from the opposite window of the
long corridor. But the throngs of people sitting on the floor
and on their own suitcases forced him to stay put. Placing his
head against the window, he tried to close his eyes and ignore
the queasiness aggravated by the sensation of closeness. The
sickness was fast invading his whole body. His legs felt as
heavy as boulders. He gasped for air as his eyes followed the
clouds racing with the train.
Quite suddenly Zelmi felt the tip of a long sharp knife
cutting through his abdomen. He recalled having felt the same
pain when the train carrying his father away from the station at
Sheshi had entered the dark tunnel. That pain would only subside
when Zelmi sat on the steps of the Church of the Dead on hot
summer days. Here Zelmi had no way of linking the pain he was
feeling with what was about to happen, for he had never been
able to foretell things the way his mother could. But it was
exactly at the moment when Zelmi’s pain grew most intense on the
train speeding undetainably towards the northern white-capped
mountains that Alexsa had given up the struggle to recognize the
people that every now and then passed below the balcony of her
home. Months later, as he still searched for a place familiar to
him in the big city of the North, Zelmi was to become acutely
aware of what had happened to his mother on that distant
afternoon.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 105
The train had increased its speed. “Are you comfortable?” the
father asked the little girl who had been sleeping with her
curly blonde head against his chest. There was no reply. Zelmi
felt a compulsion to hear the sound of her voice and to touch
her smile, a soft red petal bathed in early morning dew. She
seemed terribly alone, close to and at the same time inexorably
detached from her father. Zelmi thought of his younger brother,
Lini, always standing close to his mother and tightly clinging
to her skirt. Perhaps inside the clouds that followed the train
with unmitigated determination lay the strings that would knot
together the silent sighs of the little girl. Between the
listless child and the father’s embrace, lay the ravages of
time. But the clouds kept up their race, revealing nothing at
all.
A blanket of silence once again fell over the solitary train
ferrying the passengers, one on top of the other, and each
hoping to read the name of the station on that final
destination. In the far distance a speck of dust shining
brightly in the infinite approaching night. Someone, fearful of
the cool evening air, had closed the window, and Zelmi struggled
to find a deep, satisfying breath. Around him everyone slept.
The little girl was now staring at him. He attempted to smile at
her but found himself unable to part his lips.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 106
Incapable of preventing it, Zelmi’s eyes blurred. He found
himself on his way back to Sheshi from his grandfather’s olive
grove. A line of women, dressed in black and bearing baskets of
figs and white grapes, filed along the side of the road.
The sharp whistle of the locomotive entering the tunnel
wrenched Zelmi’s attention back to the sleepless girl across
from his seat. A feeling of uneasiness had rooted in him. Why
had he not been able to find work in the village? He did not
need much. “A person can get by with very little,” Teurini had
assured him repeatedly at the end of each conversation at the
barber shop. “But you must first satisfy the thirst inside of
you that searches for the vast spaces beyond the village.” At
times, Teurini’s words had made little sense, but Zelmi had
known enough to grasp their seriousness even if he had not
understood their full import. Many a time the words had put him
on pins and needles as he sought to return home.
The pain in his stomach had extended to his knees, and still
the little girl had not averted her eyes from his. The clickclacking of the wheels over the tracks was the only noise that
penetrated the thick silence that had settled over everyone in
the compartment. In the silence of this airless world, Zelmi
heard someone standing outside in the corridor attempt a
conversation. “I imagine the heat will let go by tomorrow.” No
response. The shades of the sliding door of the train
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 107
compartment had been pulled down, making it difficult to discern
the speaker’s face. “Do they know where they are going? Will
someone be waiting for them?” The fear that his cousin would not
be at the station filled Zelmi with terrible apprehension. The
sweat was streaking down his cheeks in big drops. The little
girl widened her smile. Zelmi, ashamed to have revealed his fear
to her, quickly dabbed his forehead with his white handkerchief,
whereupon she extended her smile to its full width and fastened
her gaze even more fixedly upon him. Zelmi felt as if he were
being drawn down into a deep abyss with a huge serpent twisting
into endless circles around a deep pool of cold waters with
floating white flowers. Fish of all colors swam rapidly from one
end to the other. From the mouth of the serpent an array of
white lilies blanketed the water’s surface.
“Tickets, please,” announced the conductor with a stern but
firm voice. Zelmi took out the ticket he had secured to his back
pocket with a safety pin. The conductor took the ticket and
verified the place of purchase and the final destination,
written in bold black letters: Foggia-Milano. Zelmi noticed the
sign of a serpent on the conductor’s visor as he bent down to
place the punched ticket in Zelmi’s hand.
Morning had sneaked into the compartment unnoticed. Streaks of
bright yellow light, awakening some and putting others further
to sleep, were filtering through the shades of the small window.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 108
“In two hours we shall reach our stop,” the little girl’s father
whispered softly to his wife, making every effort not to be
heard by the line of people standing in the corridor. Zelmi
wondered if that would also be his stop. The brightness of the
sun and the deep green vegetation that followed the train
invigorated his trembling body. He had kept vividly in mind the
description of the train station given to him by his cousin as
they had sat on the steps of the Church of the Dead in Sheshi.
“In that land, the white clouds float over gentle winds, always
searching to anchor themselves over the pinnacles of the snowy
mountains.”
In spite of having exchanged not a word with
them, Zelmi felt a sense of serenity and warmth simply by
watching the family with whom he had shared the journey. Now the
announcement by the conductor, who moved from carriage to
carriage indicating their imminent arrival at the central
station, moved the people to organize their suitcases for quick
claim. The little girl, assisted by her mother, put on her coat
and tied her shoelaces. Every now and then she sent a quick
glance to Zelmi, filling him with the strength he needed to put
his things together. “Ilía, stay close to me and hold on to my
skirt,” the mother admonished the little girl as they stood in
line to get off the train. Zelmi followed the family through the
wide corridor of the train station, filled with throngs of
passengers. The crowd moved quickly, almost to the rhythm of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 109
departing train. Announcements and other noises multiplying
suffocated Zelmi’s voice. He was afraid he would lose track of
the little girl, yet smiling at him as she was dragged over the
platform. A sea of people, drawn now closer, now apart from one
another by invisible threads, widened the distance between Zelmi
and the young girl. Years later, while holding on to his cane
and waiting for the black swallows to begin their late afternoon
chase of the sound of the bell on top of the church belfry,
Zelmi was to relive daily that pristine smile fading away in the
distance. His eyes would fill with tears, which he gently wiped
with the back of his hand while pretending to sweep away the
dust from his eyes. He could no longer keep alive the memories
of the big city. “I spent months longing to go north to the big
city,” he repeated to himself with precise consistency, “and the
nights were consumed in imagining the way the city could have
looked.” That dream came to an end as the little girl vanished
in the far distance. A cold night greeted Zelmi as he found his
way out of the train station.
The steep staircase down to the main street of the railroad
building drowned him in the vortex of an asphyxiating silence.
The air was filled with minute frozen icicles. At the end of the
street, the last passengers had turned the corner, leaving the
train station with a carpet of desolation. It was unbearably
cold. Zelmi searched frantically for his cousin’s address.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 110
He returned to the waiting room at the bottom of the stairs
and found an empty space in the far corner. The place was filled
with people sitting, their bodies motionless, their expressions
lost. As some figures lay stretched upon the wooden benches, an
old woman made a desperate search for something inside a brown
canvas bag. Near her, a young man with a thick, unkempt black
beard pressed his knees together as he rocked his head
continuously from side to side. Yet no one seemed to notice
anyone else or to be bothered by the strange aspect that each
displayed. Zelmi soon convinced himself that they all suffered
from the sickness of the loss of time. The four big clocks
placed equidistantly around the perimeter of the circular hall
were further proof to him that that was indeed the case.
Zelmi sat motionless in the only empty space in the place.
With his right arm resting upon the suitcase he thought of the
blustering fear that always afflicted him with the approach of
winter, even as the waiting room had the smell of a dry well at
the height of summer. Zelmi’s stomach began to convulse, and he
had to struggle to hold back the pernicious feeling of nausea
that had accompanied him throughout the journey. “If only I
could make some sense of this world of grey clouds and
interminable rains which keep people inside their places like
mushrooms clinging to the bark of a tree. If waiting
interminably is what awaits all those who venture out, then the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 111
curse falls on those who fall prey to the motion of things in
the world outside the mind.”
Abruptly, Zelmi realized the danger of talking to himself. He
remembered the advice the Prefti in Sheshi had given him in the
confessional booth when he had spoken of the deceptions in his
mind. “Do not forget to leave behind a trail of stones that will
guide you back from the maze of the mind. Always build bridges
with every stone that you can find.” In time Zelmi had mastered
the art of building the most complex bridge, one capable of
confusing, many times, one shore for another.
It was early in the morning and the sun had not yet broken
through the clouds. Now the waiting room smelled of smoke and
unwashed clothes. Upon opening his eyes, Zelmi noticed that no
one had moved from the places they had occupied the night
before. The four clocks, totally synchronized, marked the hour:
seven o’clock on the morning after the train had stopped at the
station of the long tracks.
Still clutching his suitcase, Zelmi sought a place where he
could wash his face. “Why was it that no one in the waiting room
noticed my presence? Did they not know that I was one of them?”
Now the nausea which had traveled with him took complete
possession of his body. What remained under his control was his
desire to climb over the wall of the train station to the
unfamiliar world outside in spite of the fact that his legs felt
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 112
like two logs with roots still attached to the earth. Zelmi was
the only one on the wide platform with the trains arriving and
departing who seemed aware of his surroundings. In the only
coffee shop in the station, the people in a row at the counter
appeared to rotate endlessly on round stools, their uniform
positions contrasting sharply with the mobility of their seats,
which looked suspended in mid-air. Here the dank air, smelling
of wet, decayed wood, found its way into Zelmi’s lungs. The
distance was still lost in utter darkness.
Along the platform, a semi-lit sign pointed to an abandoned
waiting room where the crazed paint had turned the walls into
multicolored spider webs. A sound of dripping water from the
sink broke the deep well of silence which inhabited the place.
The stench and dirty papers that carpeted the floor increased
Zelmi’s nausea. He washed his face and hands and quickly left.
Making his way back to the hall where he had spent the night,
Zelmi sat with his legs crossed next to the charcoal-burning
stove. The silence had thickened. Zelmi made an effort to recall
the smile of the little girl as she had waved good-bye, but she
had faded into the deep recesses of his mind as distant as the
emptiness that reigned in the waiting room. It was then that
Zelmi understood the implacable separateness and the inevitable
distance that follows as one image stumbles upon another.
Teurini had often spoken to him about the feeling of emptiness
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 113
that afflicted those who had gone North. “I do not know how to
describe it to you,” he had said. “You must come face to face
with it to feel the file scraping over the surface of your
bones. It opens deep cavities in everything that you see and
gives you no time to gather back the broken fragments.”
Zelmi did not even have the strength to lift his eyes to see
if any sun light from outside had made it into the waiting room
through the round upper window. He closed his eyes and wrapped
his hands around his waist. The fenced-in bodies surrounding him
were no more than inanimate objects to be discarded.
Hours, perhaps days had gone by when Zelmi was awakened with a
gentle kick on his shoes by a young man in uniform. Dazed and
bewildered, Zelmi opened his eyes but remained speechless. “It
is forbidden to sit on the floor. Either find a seat, if there
is one available, or move out of the station,” the guard
murmured with a faint smile. He had seen so many like Zelmi that
he had come to think of them as unwanted objects floating
ashore. His eyes met Zelmi’s for a fleeting moment. It was just
long enough for the guard to reach into his pocket and take out
a card with the address of a church which had set aside space to
receive and give aid to the many stranded people in the big
station. “Here,” he said to Zelmi. “The church is only a few
blocks from the station. Turn right as you leave, and look for
the bell tower with a bronze cross on top.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 114
Zelmi still hoped that his cousin would soon come to the
station to look for him so he did not move. “Egidio will come
before it gets dark,” he comforted himself. But hours went by
and the traffic at the station lessened. Most of the shops
facing the tracks had turned off their lights as the day drew to
an end like so many others. With hesitation, Zelmi forced
himself to stand. He took the address which the guard with the
smile of a newborn child had given to him.
The rain had turned into a soft drizzle which settled on his
clothes as dew on flowers on an early summer morning. The street
was caped in silence. The long road ahead of Zelmi seemed as
inaccessible as the horizon beyond the seven mountains. The fog
that had settled surreptitiously over the roof tops prevented
him from seeing the bell tower, but Zelmi could make out a
church with a lonely light at its front entrance. “Perhaps,” he
thought, “Egidio will be coming tomorrow to get me.” The church
door had been left ajar. He saw an empty corridor with one room
lit at the end and proceeded with a heavy heart toward it. At a
wooden table in the middle of the room people were eating bowls
of soup with bits of bread in it. No one had noticed his
entrance.
Zelmi sat on the bench that stood outside the door and waited
for someone to come and claim him. He wanted to close his eyes
and swirl out of the darkness of the night. Once again he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 115
searched for the thread that could lead him out of the cave and
into the smile of the little girl in the train compartment. The
dampness of his clothes provoked an intermittent shiver through
Zelmi’s body which quickly became uncontrollable. Zelmi looked
around. The world of darkness was laying siege. He looked for
support but could find nothing to hold onto. Suddenly a vision
appeared in the distance. It was that of a woman with dark
streaks running down her face. Her eyes were wide open,
frightened and bulging as if wanting to hold onto something
Zelmi could not see. “Why didn’t they close her eyes?” Zelmi had
no way of knowing that the neighbors did try to no avail to
close his mother’s eyes after they removed her from the chair
near the balcony; her eyelids were as stiff as her fingers. No
one that night dared to look at Alexa’s eyes, which seemed to
suck everything inside them like a hungry whirlwind. They had to
place a heavy glass over the casket to prevent the household
objects from falling into the swirling tunnel. The magnetic
force of the eyes emptied the house of most of its belongings.
Even the door of the house was loosening from its hinges. The
mayor of the town, who was known for his quick decisions,
ordered the keeper of the cemetery to immediately bury the body
fifty feet deep and to place upon it boulders rolled down over
freshly cut tree trunks from the tallest of the seven mountains.
The whole town was mobilized to deal with the situation that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 116
threatened to swallow everything they possessed. Zelmi prayed
for the skin to soften over his mother’s eyes. The piercing rays
emanating from Alexa’s eyes had traveled for three days and two
nights searching to bring Zelmi back to her. “I must close them.
She must find peace,” he muttered as another voice was making
its way to him. The comforting welcome of the priest of that
house of succor lessened his anxiety.
Zelmi opened his eyes and half way met those of the priest in
charge of the home. The priest’s face and understanding
expression reminded him of Teurini. He felt Teurini’s strength
as the priest helped him rise from the bench. “There is a seat
on the other side of the table,” he said. “I will bring you a
bowl of soup with a slice of bread.” Zelmi moved slowly and
certainly as he looked for the empty space at the end of the
long wooden table. No one of the innumerable people looked up to
see who this new arrival was. For a time, only the sound of the
silverware broke the silence enveloping the room. Each of them,
and Zelmi had counted them one by one, appeared to be adrift.
They were of all ages, totally detached from the rhythm of the
seasons. Their will had been carried away upon the swift current
of events rushing by. Their inner links with the floating images
outside had been severed. They had become diseased and no one
dared to cure them. Zelmi realized that he had entered a place
of last refuge, where solace substituted for any direct
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 117
intervention to cure the sickness. He remained frozen,
overwhelmed by what he was seeing. The person (“I wish I knew
his name.”) sitting next to Zelmi snatched away the piece of
bread that the priest had given him. Zelmi made no attempt to
stop him. “I would have given him the bowl of soup had he given
me any indication that he wanted it.” The fellow was much older
than Zelmi, who came to see in him the attempt to disguise the
fear in his eyes as mere hunger. Zelmi wondered if he, too, had
lost the way to return home. The soup the stranger was eating
with his trembling hands spilled all over his unkempt dark
beard. The shape of his eyes and his receded cheeks painted a
picture of a sensitive, learned man. The fingers, straight and
slender, revealed softness in his touch. His measured movements
were as harmonious as brushstrokes on canvas. “There will be no
more food for the day,” he told Zelmi without turning his head
to him.
“I am waiting for my cousin to come to get me; I shall not
remain here much longer,” Zelmi hastened to answer. He dared not
look directly at the man.
“No one comes here.” The comment came quickly from someone
else at the end of the table. “They will no longer provide me
with paper and pencil to keep count of the days,” the same
person complained. The conviction with which those words were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 118
spoken startled Zelmi. They had come from someone who lived life
inside a plastic case.
“We all have been waiting for a long time for anyone to call
on us,” the one sitting next to Zelmi whispered softly. “Do you
still want the bowl of soup?”
A prolonged silence followed. Zelmi tried to control the
involuntary twisting of his fingers. He felt his blood receding
to a hidden place in his body, turning him into a figure much
like the rest. The confusion in Zelmi’s mind and his inability
to find a way out of the situation and into the horizon of his
memories convinced him that he indeed had become part of the
group sitting rigidly around the long table. The door to the
dining hall had been closed and a visible silence hung over the
table.
“This winter the fog descending from the seven mountains will
loom over Sheshi for months. They should place warning signs on
the road beyond the train station. I should have told mother of
my decision to go north. Teurini promised me that he would tell
her of my intentions only after my departure. Teurini was right
about this part of the world. The wide illuminated streets are
crammed with autos in every little space on each side, and the
cobblestones multiply the gray colors, forging knots with the
street lamps hanging from electric wires. There are so many
closed doors. The windows are shut tight, and the plaster walls
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 119
are lined up like the cypresses along the road to Sheshi’s
cemetery. On the walls there are many writings which I cannot
decipher. You were right, Teurini. The eyes of the city carve
deep crevices inside a person. They twist into and probe the
realm of loneliness that never leaves us.”
“The door will be opened tomorrow at dawn. The priest will be
bringing a bowl of warm coffee-milk with a slice of bread,”
someone uttered. The familiar sound brought Zelmi back from
daydreaming. Sheshi vanished, taking with it the sweet scent of
almond trees of early spring. Zelmi hesitated to answer the man,
whose face he could not discern.
The music from a lone guitar filtered, note by note, through
the window into the refectory. Zelmi could not see outside, for
the shutters were closed and it was dark. The small light that
hung from the ceiling swung like a leaf in late autumn.
“In a little while they will turn the light off,” enunciated
the same unseen person. “Do not take your hands out of your
pockets. Many of us were stripped of all we had. They say it is
the priest in the black robes who comes during the fit of night,
walking two feet above the ground and snatching our belongings.
Some swear that his eyes turn fiery red, like a rod sensing
where the money is. I myself had hidden mine in my sock inside
the shoe under my pillow. I had made three knots in the sock to
ward off the evil spirits. Yes, I had learned to do that from my
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 120
grandmother, God bless her soul. She was a fine person. When I
woke up in the morning, with the sun shining right on top of my
eyes, I reached for the sock. The knots were all undone as if I
had never made any, and the money was gone. I did not mention it
to anyone; you are the first to hear of it. Not because I trust
you completely, not yet, anyway, but because there is something
in your eyes that wants to listen to me. Yes, the eyes tell
everything. They say that the eyes can make and unmake a person.
Well, I thought you should know what happens here during the
night, for in just a little while the light that shines above us
will be turned off. Can you sleep with one eye open as some
people do?”
Zelmi could still not see his face. “In the morning I shall
ask for his name. I cannot now. It is pitch dark and it is best
that I stay awake. I cannot lose the little money that Teurini
saved for me. I wish I had never left the village. Had I
listened to my mother, I would not find myself in this accursed
place. The conversations at Teurini’s barber shop insisting that
the future of the young could only be found by going North
twisted my mind. I thought of nothing else but leaving Sheshi.
“Up North, there is work for anyone willing,” they would say.
“The people are orderly and there is running water inside the
small rooms where the workers stay, and there are mirrors on top
of the sinks so that a person can look as neat as the ones
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 121
walking in the streets. No one up North bothers with useless
conversations. It is true that they are mostly silent and never
take their eyes from what they are doing. A young man cannot rot
in this isolated village where time lies still.”
Zelmi sat for hours on the lower hill of Sheshi watching the
few automobiles that whisked over the asphalt road in the near
distance. “I always thought that the drivers were looking for
their way home. At times a driver would stop for a short while,
change the tire and speed off again. No one of them ever came up
to our village to see what it looked like. Perhaps they had no
time. Or maybe they could not even see the houses because of the
rays of the hot sun overhead. Sometimes you could not tell the
difference between the light from the sun and the white-washed
walls of the homes in the village. The houses seemed to be tied
to the treeless mountain above it. Now in this dark place where
I can only hear the fearful breathing of the others, I do miss
the village. The one next to me has stopped talking to himself;
he must have fallen asleep. I will not close my eyes. I shall
wait for daylight without succumbing to the urge to sleep.”
Zelmi thought of his mother. “Don’t go out of the house. The
fields are full of vipers during the early afternoon.” Zelmi
could feel the heat of the sun penetrating through his clothes
and warming his skin. He smelled the recently cut hay and saw
the swallows feeding on the seeds lifted by the wind in mid-air.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 122
The earth, garnished green and silver, was playing music with
the chirping birds. They had gathered for a feeding frenzy in
the almond trees.
“I think I am falling asleep,” Zelmi whispered to himself. “I
can barely hear the uneasy breathing of the one next to me. I
cannot say how many hours have gone by, but dawn will be here
soon. I think I can smell the dew falling gently from the
passing clouds looking for a soft place to land. I can’t seem to
stop my left knee from jerking. I don’t want it to spread all
over my body and wake up the others in the refectory. I wish I
could close my eyes just for a little while. No one would see
that because it is really dark now. I can feel the darkness
hovering over me. It is as heavy as the air in this room. The
morning will clear the stuffy air away. I am thinking of leaving
this place as soon as they open the door. I shall not wait for
the bowl of coffee and milk and the slice of bread they
promised.” It was then that the person sitting next to Zelmi
added, “They open the door without making noise, place the bowl
of coffee and milk in front of each of us and leave without
saying a word.”
Zelmi recalled his mother’s words a few days before leaving.
“Do not leave the village; I still have to care for your younger
brother. I promised your father.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 123
Zelmi was determined to keep his eyes open until his cousin
came to fetch him. “Someone will show him the way to this place
of refuge,” Zelmi assured himself. “It is right next to the
train station. Perhaps the same guard with the sad eyes will
show him the way. Yes, I told the guard that my cousin was to
pick me up.”
Zelmi could not recall fully what the guard had answered him,
but he did recall the warnings. “Do not be in a hurry to leave
the hospice. The people outside the train station walk up and
down the street with measured steps. They won’t recognize you if
you walk too fast. You have to observe and memorize their
rhythm, their facial expressions and you have to know exactly
when to smile at someone. Do not be in haste. You’ll end up
smiling at the wrong time, and that will be the signal for the
people in the white uniforms to take you away in their blue
trucks. They will dispose of you and no one will ever know
anything about it. Not even your cousin. The trucks follow a
side street with no lights; the buildings on that street have no
doors.”
Zelmi thought he heard the door knob to the refectory turning,
but he could not remember the location of the door. He had not
looked back when the priest had brought him into the room. He
wanted to talk to the person next to him, to see his face before
leaving. He pushed the slice of bread toward him, but the streak
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 124
of light from the top window was too weak to reach the long
table.
Zelmi spoke to himself without realizing it. “I never did get
to look at his face. I tried to remember the face of the guard
with the smile of a child, but then I found myself following the
young girl with the clear eyes. I saw her hand fading away in
the crowded corridor of the train station. I could not keep up
with her because the swarm of people was pushing me towards the
waiting room. My shoes seemed to crush my feet. I wanted to
untie them and place them over my shoulders. I recalled my
grandfather with his shiny black shoes in the coffin in the
middle of the house and the wooden stool that I climbed up on to
take a better look at him. As I peeked through the glass cover
over the wooden box I noticed that one of the shoelaces was
untied. “Mother, grandfather does not want to leave yet; his
shoe is untied.”
“Quiet,” she whispered into my ear so that the other women
wailing would not hear. “He is not going away forever. One day
each one of us will join him. It is only a matter of waiting for
the right chance. Remember well and make certain that you do
so,” she used to remind all of us, especially on rainy days when
people do crazy things just to forget what awaits them at the
end. As for me, I am not going to wait for anyone anymore. The
men in the white uniforms will soon come to get me. I will be
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 125
tied to a tree and left there to dry like bark. I hope they
leave me where there is a flock of sheep grazing on the deep,
green grass like that on each side of the winding brook below
Sheshi. I remember grandfather expressing the same wish on a
clear summer afternoon. When I told mother of his wish she said
she wasn’t sure she could satisfy it because she could not find
the date on the calendar even after years and years of searching
for it.”
Zelmi did not dare to untie his other shoe for fear that his
movements would awaken the others. Someone was moaning at the
far end of the refectory.
Zelmi could have sworn that the man
next to him had dozed off, but he now heard him say, “Do not be
concerned. It is fear. Fear of the dark. Fear that he will no
longer have the will or the strength to wait for someone. I am
certain that by daybreak he will feel much better. Just rest for
now, but do not fall asleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“When everyone had left the room, mother had hastened to
remove the glass lid from the coffin. With tears in her eyes,
she had tied the lace of the left shoe. ‘I don’t want your
grandfather to wander from this life and through the other
without being able to find the repose he is looking for’”
Zelmi could not reach to tie his shoe. He wished to see the
face of the one next to him, who was breathing heavily, but the
darkness separating them was as thick as the walls of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 126
village cemetery. The silence of the refectory was slowly
receding as the streak of light in the upper window grew wider.
Zelmi checked the money in his pocket, which he knew was
sufficient to buy him a ticket back to Sheshi. His pocket was
empty. Searching frantically all about him, he appealed in a
choking voice to the priest who entered. The cleric tried to
calm him.
“My son, this is the house of God. No one robs anyone here.
God protects you all. You are his children. You must have spent
the money”
“Where is the person who was in the spot right next to me?”
“No one has been there since the gypsy left a year ago today.
If you need work, you should stand outside the house with the
others. They are picked up for a day’s work early in the
morning. Don’t stand back. Show them that you are eager. We
won’t be able to keep you here unless you are able to contribute
to your needs.”
Zelmi did not reply. He felt totally defeated. He had failed
himself and everyone else. The pain in his lower abdomen carved
his insides like a knife gutting a pig in December. Zelmi felt
just like the pig which might manage to escape the clutches of
the men holding it down only to run about with a knife still
dangling from its throat. The butchers would not even bother to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 127
chase it. “He can’t go far. Later we will follow the trail of
blood and bring him back.”
If he could have done so, Zelmi would have screamed from the
bottom of his guts to get rid of that knife scraping the meat
from his ribs. He did not know what to do. His trembling legs
would not respond when he attempted to stand up and face the
day. He had never been one to complain or ask for help. His
pride and his desire to change his situation had pushed him to
leave Sheshi and board the unending train towards the Promised
Land.
It was very early in the morning and the refectory was icy
cold. Zelmi left his bowl of milk and coffee untouched. He moved
towards the door. Even then, no one looked at him. The wall of
silence that had kept him company during the never-ending night
continued to engulf the others, whose fingers moved rhythmically
from bowl to mouth. Without having had the chance to get to know
anyone, Zelmi opened the only door of the house of refuge and
faced the cold, wintry morning of the northern city.
A wet, penetrating cold waited to envelop him completely. The
sidewalks were lined with shivering men with their hands hidden
inside their coats. They only lifted their lowered heads when
they heard the noise of a vehicle passing by, hoping that it
would stop right next to them and offer work for the day. Their
sorry appearance reminded Zelmi of the flocks of sheep herded by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 128
growling black dogs straight down from the mountain pastures
towards the slaughterhouse. Zelmi wanted to turn back, but he
saw the priest closing the door behind him with a surreptitious
smile.
“Now I am one of them, but I will not be sucked in by that
man,” he managed to murmur. So Zelmi took his place among the
men and hoped that someone would stop to offer him work. “The
one who leaves his place of birth knows what he leaves behind
but he does not know what he is going to find.” This had been
Alexa’s way of telling her son to clear his mind of false
desires and dreams of other places.
Zelmi found himself alone among a throng of impenetrable
bodies shivering under the constant icy drizzle that had begun
to drench their heads. A woman of no more than twenty, with a
shawl pulled over her hair and tied in front, yelled, calling
her husband’s attention as he stood with his eyes downcast: “The
child needs some powdered milk.” The miniscule man answered by
nodding.
“You will always be with us at the barber shop, I promise you.
Our conversations will never stop. They will keep you warm when
you are not noticed by anyone in the streets.” Zelmi found
himself gasping for a deep breath. “If no one stops for me, I
shall go back to the waiting room in the train station.” The
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 129
street signs were rendered invisible by the rain drops. “I
really do not know why Egidio hasn’t come for me yet.”
The lines of people waiting to be picked up had grown shorter.
Many had given up, planning to come back the next day. The sky
was filled with gray and black streaks. On the steps of a
building sat an old man resting his chin on a wooden cane. Zelmi
could see the wrinkles burrowing into his forehead. His lips
were tightly sealed and his hat channeled the rain away from his
eyes. A man and a woman on the opposite side of the street had
joined hands and started to walk in silence toward a cluster of
trees on top of the hill.
The penetrating dampness convinced Zelmi that he needed to get
to the train station. The couple in the park had melted into the
fog by now, and the light from the street lamps was turning the
puddles into a silver chain. Following the barely visible signs
toward the station, Zelmi sailed into the sea, thrust forward by
the desire to find his cousin. “He must be waiting for me,” he
mumbled in a tattered voice as he avoided the broken bottles
lying on the sidewalk. The garbage cans had been flipped over by
the wind, and the stench from them was unbearable. Stray dogs
searched for bits of leftovers in them or nosed through the
debris which littered the ground. Zelmi was hoping to meet
someone coming his way so that he might bid him “good day” just
for the sound of a voice. “Maybe with some luck I could even
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 130
brush my coat against theirs.” By now the rain was pouring down
in sheets.
“The harvest this year will be lost unless it rains for a day
or two.” Zelmi pivoted to see who had spoken. “The grapes need
water.” The priest had summoned the people to lead a procession
to the old Church of the Virgin of Constantinople. “I shall be
back after the Mass. Make sure your brother stays home with you.
He had a bad night and his fever was high; I had to change his
wet clothes three times to keep him cool.”
Zelmi remembered the night clearly. “I kept him next to me as
he trembled all over. I held his hand tightly and told him to
think of the red poppies in the wheat field beyond the winding
brook. ‘When will father come home?’ he had pressed.
‘He has
been away many days and nights. Mother tells me that we still
have to wait many more summers before he can save enough money
to send for us. Do you miss father?’ I told him that I missed
father as much as he did, but I could not show any weakness to
the people of Sheshi. It would not be manly. I remember to this
day how he nodded his head without asking any more questions.”
On his way to the station, Zelmi, feeling alone amidst so much
silence, noted the windows with iron shutters that locked the
people in. There was blackness on the walls and the air was
putrid. In the distance, he saw the reflection of someone
approaching as if carried by the fog; it was an old man, bent
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 131
almost to the ground and holding a small dog on a leash. They
walked slowly together, almost stopping simultaneously to gasp
for air. The little dog turned up its face, looking at its owner
as if waiting for a signal to take the next step.
“Holding onto the iron gate at the entrance of the station, I
realized how similar is the condition of all people who wait to
gather the residue of time. The road from Sheshi to the fields
seemed so far away. The earth with its open veins waited to be
blessed with drops of wind and seeded before sunset. With hopes
of a better harvest to come and with their backs bent, the
peasants followed by their dogs, climbed toward the village.
I walked towards the old man and the dog, wondering if he
would help me find my way back to the waiting room. The street
was covered with a mantle of silence. I quickened my pace,
nearing the miniscule figure who paused after each step. The
raindrops searched frantically for the stream of water that
would carry them to their resting place near the coal-burning
stove in the corner of the waiting room. There I could talk to
the old man without calling anyone’s attention. I had to avoid
being seen by the station guard. I would not again listen to
that soft voice nor be beguiled by those innocent eyes.
“I have been waiting for someone to notice me,” remarked the
old man the moment I got close to him. I had the sense that he
had been waiting for me for a long time. As for me, I felt
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 132
something surging up from inside as I reached out to touch his
hand. It was the coldness of the night. He lifted his eyes,
blurred by a deep blue film lining the tunnel that led to his
inner world. “I have been walking this street with my companion
for many years. I come out at night because I see better in the
dark. Years ago, I made the mistake of getting off at the wrong
train station. In fact, it was many, many years ago. I cannot
tell exactly how many. This street seems to get longer and
narrower with the passing of the seasons. At times I send my dog
a few steps ahead to see if he recognizes someone from the past
days, but his sight is not what it used to be, either. He relies
mostly on scent.”
The two figures on that cold, tunneled street…one bent over by
the weight of wingless hopes and the other, slim and youthful,
were not seen by anyone else that night. The old man had been
given no indication; there had been no premonitions in his
dreams that he was to leave his room for the last time in search
of someone to recognize.
“Grandfather Zelmi, on my mother’s side, had confessed to me
that he was never told the name of the person responsible for
arranging the meeting between him and the old man on the street
facing the train station of the city of the North. As I sit with
my eyes fully open in this compartment, next to my mother, I
observe each of the passengers. The woman in front of us still
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 133
holds her lips tightly and her forehead straight. I can see the
dark circles under her eyes welding rings together, but I cannot
see who is holding the end of the chain outside the train
compartment. The speed with which the train moves into the heart
of the night blinds me. I cannot see outside of the memories.
Grandfather Zelmi was right when he warned me not to trust the
reflection created by the shifting rays of the sun. “The mirror
and light are there to trick you to come out of your cave. The
mirror fragments your memories and light fades them. Keep alive
the remembrances of the past. Those who came before need you to
keep them alive. It will be your thoughts of them and your
constant shaping and reliving of the past events that will be
nourishing to you as you begin the struggle against the light
and the mirror.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 134
Chapter Four
Now that I find myself next to my mother going to the big city
that plays with the waves of the sea, I recall clearly those
dry, warm summer afternoons walking with Grandfather Zelmi
towards the chestnut grove to check on the few squash seeds he
had planted between the rows of trees. It
would take us hours to get to the top of the hill where he owned
that small grove given to him by his father. The village at that
time was a large playground lined with almond trees, like the
ones I used to see in the magazines at Prefti Vlasi’s parish
house after the hour of catechism class. In time, the narrow
winding streets of Sheshi suddenly came to an end with others
opening secretly on the left but most of the time on the right.
It was like a maze to us as we ran hiding from one another until
thirst summoned us to the main square where fountains provided
the cold water that had slid down from deep within the seven
mountains.
One afternoon, as we walked back from the field of the tall
chestnut trees, I asked mother if Grandfather Zelmi had eyes
that looked inside people’s minds. My mother scolded me,
thinking that I was making fun of his condition. She told me
never to speak that way in his presence. “We have to make his
short stay with us as pleasant as we can and help him along as
he retraces his steps before the final breath.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 135
Grandfather Zelmi went on for long periods speaking vividly of
timeless memories. “I could only imagine the pain one would feel
if unable to breathe, and that was because many times, with
friends, I attempted to hold my breath longer than they. I can
still feel the pain now in the lower part of the stomach right
next to the navel.”
“Yes, I had been waiting for many years to meet that old man
with the dog. I had been preparing myself to go there ever since
the conversation in the barbershop. At night, before closing my
eyes, I would follow the road to the train station of Sheshi
counting the steps and placing ribbons on each tree. I climbed
that dusty road so many times that even now I can recall the
number of rocks along it and the type of plants that grow on
either side. The desire to leave Sheshi and to see the big city
of the North had taken total possession of me. It soon became an
obsession. I saw it everywhere, even drew tall buildings and the
unending tracks of its train station on the fig leaves I would
save and dry carefully under the hot sun. I pretended I had a
cousin who had established himself there and was waiting for my
arrival. It all seemed so real until I could no longer tell
which the true one was: my cousin or I. The people of Sheshi
were right. I let go of the rope everyone else was holding onto.
My friends avoided me as if I carried a contagious disease. Many
a door would close on me as I walked down the road towards the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 136
unending brook to watch the fish jump into the air, reaching for
sunlight.
From time to time Teurini would give me an apple saved from
the previous harvest. With the arrival of the first cold winds,
I helped him find the wood for the winter. I would sit on
Teurini’s barber shop steps waiting for your great-grandmother
to return from gathering the few tomatoes or one or two clusters
of white grapes overlooked by the pickers in the fields beyond
the brook.
People, especially in the evening hours, would come to the
barber shop for a quick shave. Very few had their hair cut;
those who did were mostly young. They came in with a clean shirt
and a jacket, leaving behind, as they moved on to the square, a
scent that reminded me of the plants that grow very tall on top
of the sacred cave. I could see the swarms of tiny, shiny
mosquitoes following them, swirling through the air. They never
did come close to me, however, for I would have chased them
away.
The time came when people noticed if Teurini’s barber shop was
open or not or if I would be there, seated on the same spot.
Little did they know that the conversations I overheard as
Teurini shaved them began to make me feel very happy. I was
drawn to those steps the minute the sun reached its zenith over
the church belfry. The almond trees were in full bloom and the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 137
swallows swooped into the sky, diving every now and then, beak
first, into the cold waters of the fountains.”
At this hour the barber shop in Sheshi became a hub of
stories. Those who came in to make themselves presentable to the
others in the main square of the village came also to be
enchanted by the stories told and to enter the gates of fabled
lands. It was an initiation that lasted all afternoon. The
shattering of the old strictures nourished their childhood
curiosity, kept hidden from others during their daily activities
in the fields and during their encounters in the square in the
late afternoons. At night, while sitting motionless outside the
café entrance, they lived the unshared adventures in their own
chosen spaces, traveling over long and perilous roads, slaying
dragons, and rescuing young maidens just as the cinema heroes
did in the first movies that had been shown in the village.
Their minds would tell and retell those events, polishing and
adding unseen elements which turned them into silent stories.
Sheshi became a sea of stories with storytellers young and old.
It must have been the warmth of the wood burning slowly in the
fireplaces of the village and the countless sparks emanating
from the logs that inspired them to tell of these legends.
During the annual festival of songs, the storytellers would
recount, in a city whose waters were as blue as the sky after
sunset, sweet melodies rose from the depths of the sea.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 138
The barber shop would fill with people eagerly waiting, with
fingers crossed, for Teurini’s magic hand to bring those sweet,
torturing melodies from the city beyond everyone’s reach. The
small shop, with two large mirrors in front of two revolving
chairs, was blanketed in deep silence. The sonorous wind coming
from the ridges of the seven mountains filled the sky over the
village with stimulating sounds, causing the swallows,
inebriated by the strange harmony beating against their wings,
to interrupt their flight in mid-air. The doors of the houses
that had been shut for months during the cold days of winter now
opened. The hinges and locks were drawn out of their places by
the sweet sounds. It was the hour in which Sheshi would fall
into the deepest recesses of dreams. No one would see or feel
the presence of others. During the playing of songs, the young
girls would hasten to select the best flowers from their vases
and to save them in white envelopes with the hope of contracting
the sound and their aroma into one single sensation. The houses
smelled of spring and of sights of love which confounded even
the eldest women in the village. The elders themselves could not
decipher the phenomenon. It had never happened before. “The
world has certainly changed, and we were not even aware that
those changes were coming,” they murmured softly to one another.
They blamed it on the people, particularly on the young, who,
during the summer months, disseminated strange ideas gotten from
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 139
other lands and displayed unrecognizable items which confounded
those of Sheshi to the point of forcing each of them to latch
his door with the heaviest key. During the early afternoon
hours, the devil would roam freely through the village streets,
handing out drawings of things and places that no one could
identify.
The only people who knew the source of the
strange designs were those who had gone beyond the snow-capped
mountains in search of their relatives to places where strange
things happened. “There,” they would say, “people do not
understand one another. Each one speaks his own language. Bright
lights and unfamiliar, sweet sounds move people from one place
to another.
But very few of those listening understood what was being said
in Teurini’s barber shop. The machine that produced the
captivating sounds was Teurini’s prime gift. He had received it
from his cousin in a wooden box stamped all over with the word
“fragile” in bold letters. “I can only tell you,” Teurini would
insist, “that the machine came from the land where dreams and
despair grow like fruit on trees.”
“I was the only one to have seen it as I was trying to stack
the pieces of wood in the far corner of the barber shop. Most of
the people who listened to the explanation paid no attention to
it. They were concerned neither with the origins of those songs
nor with the channels through which they emerged; but they
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 140
simply could not listen to them enough. Although listening made
them feel strange, the songs also filled their inner spaces with
a pleasant sensation of lightness. The experience reminded them
of the vibrating flight of the mockingbirds over the pomegranate
trees. Sooner than imaginable, the square in Sheshi became the
place where everyone, young and old, would gather to try to
whisper from memory the melodies heard outside the barber shop.
The women, sitting on balconies screened by vases of basil and
parsley, were convinced that it was a side effect of the burned
oats their men drank with hot water at the café. “If this
continues,” said Serafina to the neighbor with whom she shared
half the balcony, “the men will forget how to work the land and
we will all starve to death.”
That very evening they decided to share their concerns about
the dangerous effect of the coffee on their men openly with the
priest. It was the hour before the recitation of the novena. The
women were not aware that the priest himself had fallen into the
habit of having hot coffee four times a day, starting at eight
in the morning. This precise ritual occurred on the hours he
carefully marked on a calendar with a perfect circle over the
twelve hours of the day and the twelve hours of the night. He
kept both the calendar and the sacred book locked in the
chestnut bookcase.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 141
“Having a cup of coffee with friends in the afternoon is a
spiritual necessity,” the priest assured his concerned
parishioners. Prefti Vlasi had been the parish priest for many
years and so understood the need for a person to reminisce with
a cup of hot coffee. It was his way of tapping the private inner
realm.
For the rest of the people, the town’s small theatre, built
on the outer road that led to the cemetery, offered them the
same escapades. The town’s authorities had decided that the
theatre be built away from places frequented by the women of the
village. Mothers and wives insisted that their sons and husbands
not leave the theatre laden with dreams.
The theatre soon became a window to the outside world. The
screen was filled with all kinds of vast prairies where dozens
of soldiers in dark blue uniforms chased Indians decorated with
feathers and riding pinto ponies. Or again, there were ships
with endless lights floating on seas as the waves washed their
sides; below deck were ballrooms decorated with multicolored
lights more varied than those of the firmament. Crammed within
them were languid women with cheeks as white as goat’s milk,
bending and sighing to the sound of music played by so many
different instruments. Accompanying these sylphs were men all
attired in identical formal garments.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 142
Not long after the first opening, the move house became a
threat to the peace of mind of the people of Sheshi. On Sundays,
standing taller than usual, Prefti Vlasi exhorted the women who
attended Mass to keep their men at home even if they had to
enchant them. “The men of the village are not paying attention
to the children, nor are they keeping their marital
obligations,” the priest cried.
Indeed, whether at home or in the fields, whether awake or
asleep, the men could not keep their minds off those magical
places or those beautiful, delicate butterfly faces seen on the
silver screen. On Sunday afternoons,
after the last showing, the whole crowd, falling into a deep
stupor, was given over to dreams. It was as if everyone were in
a daze. Even the women, mending old work clothes behind the
window curtains or seated on the balconies, had difficulty
recognizing their own men.
But the “disease,” as Prefti Vlasi called it for lack of a
better word, ended up infecting him, as well. He would ask the
young men (those few who had been forced by circumstances to
attend Sunday Mass) to confess all that which they had seen at
the movie house. “It is like no other thing ever witnessed or
heard of before,” they would say. “It makes one want to go to
those places and to touch the people who live in them.” Another
confessed, “I get a terrible pain in my lower abdomen, and it
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 143
only abates when I write about the swallows and the flowers that
bloom in early spring down below the village along the winding
brook.”
Prefti Vlasi understood very well what was happening to the
young men. “They are coming of age sooner than they should,” he
would murmur to himself. At times, during the celebration of the
Mass, he would notice them gripping love letters, which they
stealthily transferred to the trembling hands of young girls
when he would ask them to exchange the vows of peace. But he
came to believe that this was God’s way of calling His children
close to Him and, thereby, of confirming his own vocation as the
Prefti of Sheshi.
Not long thereafter, Prefti Vlasi began writing letter after
letter to the Bishop in Potenza seeking permission to preach
across the seven mountains so that he could spread this newfound
message of love to other youths. He sat patiently, in sickness
or in health outside the Church every late afternoon, waiting
for the mailman to deliver the Bishop’s reply. The passersby
soon took pity on the Prefti, sitting expectantly on his wooden
chair, scarcely covered by his black coat in the lazy, cold
rains of late November.
But they soon began to wonder if he had abandoned them. All
kinds of herbal teas were brewed to bring the priest back.
Nothing worked. The young women who had made preparations for
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 144
their weddings months in advance could no longer wait for the
priest to come to his senses. Angry and impatient, they implored
their parents to summon a younger, more capable priest to the
village. “Don’t waste your time,” was the answer they received.
“No one will be sent to this village. In a little while you will
be able to pray to God through the moving screen with the metal
box. You won’t even need to go to the priest to receive
communion. A piece of bread will have the same effect.”
The town’s mayor had seen the people sing and dance inside a
metal box in the big town of the region where they had once gone
to sell knives and scissors. He was determined to bring this
innovation from Potenza to Sheshi. “It is about time that we
open our eyes to how things are done outside the world of our
memories,” he said to the villagers in the café. “It is for the
good of our children, for they will be staying behind when we
are gone.”
At first, the townspeople had no idea of what he was talking
about; they assumed that their incomprehension was due to the
divide between the speech of the municipal authorities and those
of the common folk. The men who conducted business in the town
hall were chosen to lead simply because they spoke and wrote a
language which had very little to do with the sounds of the four
seasons and the changes in color of the wheat fields. Confusion
finally took hold of every home in Sheshi. The young ones were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 145
having difficulties identifying the sounds with which to name
the new objects. They consulted the elders at the bottom of
Sheshi. But the old men and women concluded that the new sounds
that had taken hold of the village had nothing to do with those
with which they were familiar. Not long after, the people of
Sheshi spent hours in the main square attempting to communicate
their simplest needs and desires. The magic box which the mayor
had brought back to the village from Potenza was declared the
culprit by the town council of elders, who finally decided to
appoint a special commission composed of people of all ages to
study and decipher the sounds which emanated from the metal box.
To many, a trick was involved, since the sounds themselves did
not reflect any gesture or feeling which they had ever
experienced before. Some felt that the box was a way to keep the
young busy and the restless restrained. Many others felt its
appearance confirmed the fact that the village had failed to
recognize the changes that come with progress. And to the meager
few who had always lived by themselves among thousands of books,
constantly searching for that one that they could recommend to
everyone else, it was a way to erase individual differences. “In
a short while, we are all going to think alike,” warned the one
who possessed the rarest book collection in all of Sheshi.
Sooner than expected, the metal box had entered every home.
Explanations for its use were given daily in the square by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 146
people dressed in white and black uniforms. Mothers found
themselves unable to detach their children from the magical box;
even those youngsters with restlessness written all over their
foreheads stayed glued to it until the screen began to move with
a gentle touch of a key.
The young went beyond the seven mountains and for the first
time measured the width of rivers and the height of endless
chains of mountains without actually climbing up to the train
station. For the elderly at the bottom of Sheshi, the wandering
spirits had taken over. The world they had known but had not
finished deciphering was quickly coming to an end. Greetings in
the streets were rarely exchanged. The fountain of the fig trees
on the road to the wheat fields began to dry. Future brides
abandoned their embroidery as they learned that more symmetrical
sheets and bedcovers, as well as shiny silverware and soft
tablecloths could be had in places indicated on the magical box.
The Church of the Dead locked its doors after Prefti Vlasi’s
internment at the hospice just beyond the village crossroads. In
short order it began to show the damaging effects of the rains
and the wind. Rats had begun to chew on the few remaining wooden
benches infested with black ants.
From time to time an old disheveled woman could be seen
kneeling on what once must have been the high altar. No one,
however, was able to identify her, nor did anyone dare to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 147
approach her for a good look. Something about her prevented even
the most curious from looking directly into her eyes. The
children who taunted her with all manner of name-calling found
that the rocks they threw at her as she knelt turned into
sparrows who took flight in alarm over her head. At night, the
woman’s piercing cries traveled through every street and up
every alley, knocking on every door and filling the people’s
eyes with floods of tears. Every homeowner put out a piece of
bread and a glass of water for her roaming soul. Only with the
first streaks of dawn would her penetrating lament die down.
Finally, those few town’s folk who dared to venture from the
security of their homes attended a special meeting, where they
decided to collect funds from everyone, within the village and
beyond it, in order to restore both the Church of the Dead and
the former order and civility of Sheshi. Master Grandfather
Zelmi, whose house sat in a field of red clay at the highest
point of the village, was selected to repair the statue of the
Virgin Mary with the bloody tears. Master Grandfather Zelmi had
been the toymaker of all the children of Sheshi for as long as
anyone could remember. People said that he always gave a bit of
his soul to each of his creations so that they could speak to
him during the long winter days.
The mayor himself, accompanied by his entourage, set out for
the ceramist’s home to demand that Grandfather Zelmi restore the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 148
delicate balance between sound, color and feelings to all the
damaged statues of the Church of the Dead. When the men were
unable to find the right road, they stopped at the barber shop,
where Teurini gave them an old map made of goat skin. “Just
avoid touching the prickly bushes that enclose his property,”
Teurini warned. “I’ll have the boy take you up to the lower
hill. the house is visible from there.”
“I remember that afternoon very well because the air was
redolent with rosemary. It was the season for it to bloom at the
foot of the tallest of the seven mountains, and the soft breeze
would bring its scent down to the village. That was the signal
to climb the mountain and claim the plant with the silver color
and pungent odor. The rosemary needles smelled like the air on
top of the seven mountains as they dried next to the burning
logs of the fireplaces.
We reached Grandfather Zelmi’s house at sundown. The ascent
was most difficult because of the long, prickly bushes, known as
“drizët” by the mountain people; all the November rain had
caused them to grow into the size of small trees. Behind me I
had heard nothing but curses from the mayor and his entourage
during the arduous climb. There were three of them, dressed in
light clothing but sweating and scratching their hands as they
tried to keep pace. I could see that they did not even know the
land whose fate they would be deciding.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 149
“I shall give orders to burn all this bad brush,” one of them
said. I could not tell which one it was, since none of them had
said a word to me, but I did see that it was the one who had
bloodied his hands far worse than the others because he had
taken the lead behind me. From this vantage point I could see
the brown rooftops of Sheshi clinging ever so closely to one
another, as in the picture which hung over the big bed in our
house. That was the picture which I missed the most when I took
the train that early morning to go to the big city in the North.
The swallows swirling around the main fountain in the square
looked like tiny insects, just like the ones I used to see along
the brook flying around and around, teasing the fish in the
slowly moving water.
I do not know how he could have known, but Master Grandfather
Zelmi was waiting for us as we reached the top of the hill. “I
will be ready with the statue of the Crying Mother before Good
Friday,” he yelled from in front of his house. His assertive
voice and timeless appearance left everyone speechless. “I will
use the dark clay that gathers at the foot of the mountain where
the poplars dance in the wind,” he announced. The mayor, by now
sweating profusely, asked Grandfather Zelmi if he needed any
help bringing the statue down to the village. “I will carry her
on my shoulders during Holy Week,” he answered, as he turned to
open the door to his stone house with no windows. That was the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 150
last time I saw Grandfather Zelmi, even though I could still see
much of his childlike face in the statue of the Crying Madonna
when they carried her through every street of the village
looking for her son, as she had done ever since the arrival of
the red-bearded refugees from Constantinople.”
“Holy Week was a special time in Sheshi. For awhile, people
seemed to become themselves again, pacing back and forth along
the main street. The bricklayers were busy restoring the Church
of the Dead, which was to receive the Virgin Mother with the
tears in her eyes. The women planted the grain seeds that never
failed to sprout in green and yellow colors on the Day of the
Resurrection. I remember Grandfather Zelmi saying that it was
time for me to hide so as not to be seen by the procession of
women with disheveled hair and lacerated breasts as they
followed the statue of the Crying Virgin. The women of the
village dressed in black for nine months of the year, each
mourning the death of every child born and yet to come. The
women’s cries awoke every serpent in the surrounding wheat
fields. The meandering snakes en route to the sacred cave
gleamed like so many falling stars, awing the people of Sheshi
for three days. Black drapes hung from every window and balcony
to mitigate the brightness.
Grandfather Zelmi had sent an impression of the Crying Mother
to everyone who had left Sheshi for distant lands. “It was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 151
through the old man with the dog that I learned of Grandfather
Zelmi’s impression of the Crying Virgin Mary as we walked
towards the waiting room of the train station of the big city in
the North,” Grandfather Zelmi recalled as the Holy Week
approached. “The impression told me that you had arrived in the
city. I had been waiting for you for a long time, just like the
others had waited for me before. It is only a matter of time for
the circle to close. There will be no others left.” These were
the words which caused Grandfather Zelmi’s eyes to fill with
tears when he recalled them in a subdued voice.
Not too long ago, just as the train left the station, my
mother asked me not to look back at the village. I did not know
then what her motive was. The resigned faces of the middle-aged
couple seated across from us told the story of the end of the
cycle. But the long talks with Grandfather Zelmi urged me with
their persistence to open the door to them widely.
“I cannot tell you precisely how long we stayed in that
isolated corner of the waiting room next to the small coalburning stove. I covered my face for fear of being recognized by
the guard who every now and then peaked inside to make sure that
no one had moved from his assigned place. Everyone in that
large, windowless corridor stood motionless. I could only see
involuntary stirrings whenever the whistle of the locomotive
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 152
announced the arrival or departure of a train. Nothing more. We
were placed in a special area for stranded people.
Outside, things moved too quickly. I don’t think any one of
us, sitting where we were, could have dealt with the noise or
with the rushing. People outside moved with the precision of a
clock as if maneuvered by someone in the station.
The old man, hiding his dog from the guard, was leaning with
his head on my chest, but I could scarcely follow the movement
of his breathing. It was very uneven, and at times he gasped
more deeply for air. I became determined to sustain and protect
him. In fact, I came to feel that it was my calling to find any
kind of work inside or outside the station just to provide for
him. For a moment I wondered if the little girl with the curly
blonde hair knew that I was still in the waiting room. Perhaps,
I thought, she will come back to show me the way out of the
station. The waiting room was getting colder and colder. I could
see the vapor rising from the people to the ceiling of the
corridor. The dog had not moved at all. Not even his tail could
be seen. Nor could the guard.
I left the waiting room when it was still dark so that I could
take my place where I could be most visible to the people
looking for day laborers. “The old man knows that I will be back
with a warm bowl of soup, the kind that will ease his
breathing.” During the night, the long fingers with which he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 153
held the dog had not even twitched, and his coloring had been
rather unusual. It had been like that of the sky after one of
those storms which would roll over Sheshi in August, snapping
all the grapes from their vines. The color, in fact, looked much
like that of the statue of Master Grandfather Zelmi. Years
later, of course, it became clear to me that I had been holding
the body of Master Grandfather Zelmi in that waiting room.
That morning I left the waiting room when it was still dark. I
remember the heavy air and the bitter cold. The few lights still
shining added a deep silence to the street where the long lines
of people waiting to be picked up stretched as far as the eyes
could see. The men stood like sheep, their heads lowered beneath
the incessant raindrops. The sight would have stirred pity and
anger in anyone looking at those faceless people, beaten and
bent by others’ callousness and indifference. Yet there I was,
too, waiting to be chosen, by chance, by someone coming from who
knew where, someone utterly indifferent to my needs and wants.
The image of the old man and his dog cloaked in futility awaited
us all. “We have all been tricked!” I yelled at them, but I did
not see one face look up. Swept by a wave of nausea, I stepped
out of the line without saying a word. A bitter sensation filled
my mouth as I clung to the lamp post. The rain-filled fog
rendered the people on line invisible to the drivers speeding
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 154
by, unconcerned. Their bodies receded into the fog along with
the flickering lights drowned by the unrelenting raindrops.
After a few days of standing in line, I knew that I had to
cross the snowcapped mountains to the North of the city to look
for work. There, I had heard, one could save enough money to
live for months. I was determined not to give in to the
resignation I saw in the faces of all of those who stood in line
rigidly beneath the beating of the cold rain.
Two men wearing dark blue uniforms and waving batons in the
air crossed into the darkness where the people waited in line.
They urged them to move on. Like ants following one another,
those in the line dispersed, taking refuge in the open doorways
and archways of the side street. Above, the first signs of light
were announcing the beginning of a new day, with people moving
up and down in measured steps, stopping every now and then in
front of a lit window, attracted by the array of things they
fancied. Lines crisscrossed, entangling and disentangling from
corner to corner. Cars and trucks moved with mathematical
precision, turning their signal lights on and off and shooting
through the air as if controlled by the round lights of
different colors hanging in mid-air. Only years later did I
learn that each person inside each automobile carried a sundial
that sent messages to the other automobiles. I sat on the steps
of a home and thought of your great-grandfather so far away
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 155
beyond the unending ocean, searching for a home where there were
no homes, feeding his long desire to unite his family under the
dream of security. Your great-grandmother never failed to remind
him that dreams are made of the colors of the rainbow. They
vanish before you have a chance to see where they come from.
“They are made to entice the children to fly their kites after
the summer rains,” she would say. Somehow your great-grandfather
knew he had to shelter his own dream and one day, like so many
before him, climb the hill that led to the train station of
Sheshi. Now we both know that no one escapes from that
compulsion to go beyond the seven mountains. “For some,” mother
would say,” the stay in distant lands is short; for others, it
is as long as a life time. But they all come back to make
certain that the village will go on living its eternal dream of
building homes of memories beyond the infinite horizons of
time.”
The train came out of the last tunnel and went by an abandoned
train station without reducing its speed.
Grandfather Zelmi’s
memories were as clear as the resigned punishment on the faces
of the elderly couple sitting in front of us. “I walked back to
the waiting room of the train station. It was completely
deserted. The many tracks that faced the station were empty.
Garbage cans were lying empty with the refuse scattered on the
pavement. The wind whistled as it passed from one arch to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 156
another, swirling newspapers into the air. I dragged myself to
the waiting room with a feeling of apprehension. The hall, too,
was completely empty. I fixed my eyes on the corner where I had
left the old man with the dog, but I only saw the scarf he had
used to cover the dog. I ran outside the station only to face an
icy wind and walls of water. That night, I ran for a long time,
hoping to find the old man and his dog.
I woke up inside a small truck with many other people inside.
They were mostly young with fearful eyes and rigid hands. I was
as frightened as they were. We all knew not where we were going.
The women, with heads covered by black shawls, sat cross-legged
as they held their children, still tender in age. Passive and
despondent, they clung to their husbands as if they wanted to
share the fear of uncertainty and the trepidation of the moment.
The truck was unbearably cold. We must have been traveling
through the snowy mountains, for, at times, I could hear the
sound of rushing water on our side, like the water I would hear
in Sheshi after a heavy rainfall that brought down from the
mountains everything it could find in its path.”
Those were terrible events. The ones who suffered the most
were the peasants who lived down in the flatlands. After the
storm everyone would go down into the ravines to see what they
could salvage among the dead animals. A lamb or a goat could be
found alive, shrinking against a cliff. For most, it was the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 157
beginning of a hard life ahead. They gathered what they could
and began rebuilding their huts. For the others, and especially
for the young ones who had no patience, it was time to climb the
hill that lead to the train station.
“At this very moment I could see the same look of desperation
in the faces in front of me. “We are all searching for something
better than what we left behind,” the one whose eyes had the
shape of two daggers murmured softly. The people in the truck
had dark brown skin and long thick black hair plaited in braids.
They were rather small in stature and held their young wrapped
in colorful woolen mantles. They must have been on the road for
months. Each family shared grains of corn they carried in a
small leather sack. Each face bore an air of passivity, an
atavistic patience. I offered them the piece of bread I had
saved from the refectory. The smile I received from the head of
the family was to stay with me for the rest of time. The smile
had all the innocence of childhood rescued from oblivion.
From the small opening in the canvas cover of the truck I
could see a chain of mountains with clouds resting on their
peaks. They were taller than our seven mountains whose movements
and shifts in search of the sun I followed from the stone steps
of the Church of the Dead in Sheshi. I thought of the hour
before sunset when the mountain peaks turned into little colored
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 158
boats with white sails flying towards the endless horizons but
always coming back to rest at the earliest signs of dawn.”
It was the time when the fields were filled with infinite
colors bedazzling the flowered fruit trees, with the red of
poppies and with the yellow of the sprouting wheat. The air
smelled of spring. The somnolent odor was carried to the main
square of Sheshi by the soft breeze that came from where the sun
rises in the morning. Every door and window of the homes was
opened to harness as much of the perfumed air as possible. The
young girls opened the small bottles they had saved and filled
them with the precious aroma. They hid the bottles in their
dolls’ dresses, fearful of being caught growing up too fast
without the consent of their parents. It was a game they played
with deftness and precision to keep one world from ever
infringing upon the other. The elders of the village were the
only ones who could follow the movement of the young from the
fields of childhood imagination to the confined space of the
main square. The grandmothers would soon summon the white-haired
woman outside the ancient cave of the serpents who bathed the
girls in water filled with rose petals, cut her long and
disheveled hair and exposed her breasts bursting with life. The
girls were then instructed to jump three times over their rag
dolls for which they had cared throughout their tender years.
The thirty-three needles placed in the doll’s heart were then
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 159
removed carefully, avoiding any lacerations. Aided by their
grandmothers, who had been following the ceremony at a distance,
the girls would then each choose a spot to bury her doll.
Thenceforth, she would begin to tie her hair into knots and she
would resolve to no longer look at people in their eyes.
“I wondered if the woman who sat across from me, gently
inclined against her husband’s shoulders, had ever lifted her
eyes. The tenderness with which she held her child was
reminiscent of the statue of the Crying Madonna on the niche
next to the altar of the Church of the Dead. That mother
understood the people so well. At times, she was heard to speak
to them softly, barely moving her lips as the faithful knelt in
front of her. It was said in Sheshi that she had a special place
in her big red heart filled with needles for everyone in need.
Old Elías, the village storyteller, would get his stories from
her. “She is full of heartbeats,” he maintained. “Each pounding
of the heart reveals a line of a story that has no end and I
share them with you so that her heart never stops beating. You
must do the same as you grow up and take the road up to the
train station.” Old Elías, as the rest of the people in the
village, understood that every young man, sooner or later, would
leave the village. “Our village gives life and waits patiently
to receive it at the end when there are no more roads to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 160
follow.” Old Elías’s words were as clear as a spring day after a
downpour.
I sat in that cold, damp truck and realized how the distance
from one’s place of birth sharpens the eyes and stimulates the
mind. Old Elías knew deep in his memories what awaited each of
those straightforward faces that listened to his stories. I
could tell the way he gazed into our eyes, reading in them what
was to happen and only allowing a tear or two to fill his eyes.”
Old Elías would always be the first one at the train station
to say good-bye to the departing young man with the saddest look
and a trembling handshake. He left the train station only when
the train dove deeply into the darkness of the tunnel.
Each departure was followed by days of silence in the village
during which the people walked with their eyes lowered to the
ground. Although the children still imitated the flight of the
swallows in front of the fountain and the adults, dressed as
always with their starched collars rigidly tied around their
necks, came down to the square in search of a cool breeze, the
latter avoided coming face to face with one another for fear of
showing the tears forming in their eyes. Indeed, the elders
often went to the fountain that stood between the two giant fig
trees to wash the sadness from their eyes while pretending to
check the ripeness of the fruit.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 161
The melancholia that had taken over the village affected even
the few remaining swallows. In those days, they were rarely seen
diving and swirling in the air with the sound of the bells. The
air filled, instead, with the moans of the dead escaping from
the crevices of the tombs in the mausoleums. The night belonged
to the departed souls. The sign of the cross was placed on every
door and prayers were said for those souls still unable to
detach themselves from the warmth and memories and breath of
their kin. Many a time, deep scratches were found on every door
in Sheshi. It was a strange, indecipherable language. People
said that they were the scratches made by the wolves that
searched for the warmth of the fireplaces. She sobbed many a
night. The winters seemed never to come to an end with so many
people gone across the ocean. But it was when the wheat fields
were emblazoned in yellow that the women felt their husbands’
absence. The oldest of the seventeen elders was sent around the
village to announce that it was time to cut the wheat and to
prune the olive trees for the fall harvest.
Old Elías spent the winter days reading and interpreting the
letters the people of Sheshi received from their sons and
husbands. He showed me the strange looking people and animals on
the postage of the envelopes and told me that one day I also
would have to go to the city of the blue seas. “There,” he said,
with the sadness lodged permanently in his eyes, “you will get
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 162
the boat that will take you to the city of dreams and where
books that carry pictures of the places and people in the world
are kept. You have to find the right one. Many of the books are
covered in dust; others have faded words and still others have
words that hide so far beyond one’s depth that you will need a
concave glass to fetch them from the deep. They call the place
“Arcana Imperi.” People go in one by one and they hold onto a
white string that glows in the dark. That is the only way they
can find their way back to the starting point. I have been told
that many never do find their way back because they let go of
the string and are then bewitched by the power of the words
which lock them in never ending intersecting caves.
Old Elías always interpreted the letters in ways that would
have pleased the anxious parents and wives. “I am working very
hard and there is nothing that I desire that I cannot have,” he
read to all of them. Hearing such words from their loved ones
made their hearts pound a little less fitfully. Soon enough, Old
Elías’s home began to fill with sacks of dried fruits and
olives. The content of the letters, and the references to things
never seen in Sheshi, filled me with a gnawing, inner curiosity
that Old Elías did not fail to notice.
“You will know then your
time to leave the village is near.”
“I remember well that it was at this time that I felt a pain
in one of my shoes that increased unbearably as I passed under
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 163
the window of Anastasia, your grandmother. It was a small stone
that turned into a prickly needle when I looked at her ashen
face. “You are turning into a man,” your grandmother told me
when I mentioned the pain to her. “There is no stone inside your
shoe, so don’t waste your time looking for one.”
Months later, I realized that the pain inside the shoe had
developed an echo in my heart. “I planted it there,” Anastasia
wrote on the flowered paper she threw at me as I stood
underneath her window waiting anxiously to glimpse her face.
“Don’t lose the paper, for it has the perfume of the flowers
that grow down in the ravine. It will remind you of me and the
flowers that only open their petals to the full moon.”
I woke up tightly holding the amulet that your greatgrandmother had saved for me with the Madonna of Constantinople
and the flowered letter of Anastasia. I saved that amulet for
you. You will recognize it by the shiny button in the shape of a
heart in the middle of it. “Always keep the amulet with you,”
Old Elías said to me when I showed it to him. “When you long for
the village, you have only to touch it and close your eyes. You
will find yourself at once at the old fountain where everyone
comes to collect the water in their jars. Their faces tell the
story of Sheshi, and they move easily from one side of the
fountain to the other. It is the desire to see what lies behind
the fountain that draws everyone back to the village. The
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 164
journey will be long or short; no one knows. But they all end up
here no matter where they have been.”
The truck bumped over the rocky road. Piles of debris massed
against the edges of the road and the rain fell on top of the
truck like the hail of an August storm. We had been traveling
for two days and two nights. The driver shouted and cursed at
every jolt. The men kept a close watch on their women. At night
they huddled around the fire and were told not to fall asleep.
Their eyes filled with the kind of fear that I had seen on the
faces of the people in our village as the torrents of water
which came from the mountains year after year washed away all
they possessed.
It must have been late during the third night that the
unthinkable happened. The full moon had lodged itself over the
camp. Bottles of a white-colored alcohol shone like mirrors in
the moonlight. The caravan of people stood close to one another,
forming one big black shadow between the burning pile of wood
and the ever clearer moonlight. I had taken a place further from
the spot where the fire burned slowly. The rain had turned the
night into a cold, clear canvas of stars. We were to cross the
border before the first rays of light. From a distance I could
sense the fear that enveloped each family, bathed in the sad
moonlight, as the fire slowly died down.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 165
I saw a woman leaving one of the clusters of families. Her
children must have been sound asleep on her husband’s lap. She
moved slowly towards the woods, trying to suffocate the sound
made by her walking shoes. I made nothing of it until I heard a
piercing cry rend the stillness of the night. I rushed to the
woods and saw the husband now consoling his wife, who was still
holding the bloody rock in her hand. On the ground, with his
face covered in blood which still gushed from his wounds, lay
the truck driver, recognizable only by his multicolored
shoelaces. Not a word was spoken.
For the rest of the night we waited for dawn. We were going to
cross the border on foot. I placed the youngest one of the
family on my shoulders; throughout the whole ordeal he did not
whisper a word as his mother, watching him fixedly, followed us
with great trepidation. Yet there was no power anywhere that
could have stopped that woman with the curly black hair from
crossing the rocky brook and moving with difficulty through the
thick woods to the other side of the frontier.
I could see the rays of the sun shooting like arrows through
the dense foliage. The caravan people scattered upon reaching
the asphalt road. I arrived at a stone farmhouse with a white
wooden fence in front of the entrance. There a red-haired,
rather tall man motioned me to follow him to the rear barn. It
became clear that he was used to receiving clandestine workers
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 166
at the farm that was to be my place during my stay in that land
on the other side of the snow-capped mountains. I did not even
have time to ask his name. He told me not to make myself visible
during the morning hours when the local officials made their
rounds checking for illegal workers. I helped with the harvest
of beets and potatoes just before the first frost. The fields
were coated with a fresh sheet of ice as fall was living its
last days.
During the long winter days I thought of the fear in the faces
of those strangers inside the truck. I felt the weight of their
wanderings and the laments of their mutilated voices. They had
traveled over seas and mountains to reach what they were told
would be the “promised land.” The stories that I had heard in
the barber shop died in the peak of winter. “The nights are
still filled with their distant faces and their pleas still go
unheard.”
“You should keep alive their memories as I have done when I am
gone,” Grandfather Zelmi said with an unusual assertiveness.
Grandfather Zelmi closed his eyes forever with the fall of the
first snows.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 167
Chapter Five
Soon after, father announced his intention to join his sister
in America and get the family out of Sheshi. “There is no more
space for us in this village,” he announced to each of us as if
expecting comfort. It was not until much later that I managed to
bridge together Grandfather Zelmi’s accounts and father’s desire
to join his sister in the lands across the ocean. The bridge
grew stronger and stronger with the passing of time. People say
that bridges and pictures have a life of their own, and so it
happened in our home in Sheshi. Mother began to fill the small
dresser she kept next to the balcony with all the pictures she
could dig out of her wooden chest. “In every picture there is
that special moment that was able to escape the pounding of the
clock in front of the municipal building,” she would say to us
as she glimpsed in her face the vanishing smiles and the
approaching sadness.
While the village clock on the municipal building continued to
relentlessly move on with the precision of former decades,
mother, my younger brother and I found ourselves in the waiting
room of the train station on top of the hill. Sheshi was
awakening from its nocturnal frozen landscape and was preparing
to nestle itself under the first rays of the rising sun. The
clouds that during the night had spanned the breadth of the sky
and had encircled every rooftop quickly vanished. The lights of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 168
the village flickered shyly in the winding streets as the homes
unwove mantles of stars from their windows.
It had been during such a morning that I had watched descend
into the square of Sheshi a lone woman, her gaze speechlessly
intent upon the cupola of stars lingering over the town. On
another such morning, a soft breeze wafted into the square,
carrying upon it the scent of the eucalyptus which grew in the
groves at the side of the road connecting the village with the
train station. The whistle of the eight o’clock train from the
East announced the beginning of the day to the young men sitting
outside the café. Women dressed in black moved silently along
the walls, covering their lips and unperturbed by the sound of
the doors being opened for the day. Two elderly people greeted
one another with a trembling handshake. I sat on the steps of
the Church of the Dead, hoping to discern the hidden soul of
Sheshi. The elderly, who sat unmoved on the wooden bench under
the almond tree, swore that they could see the soul of the
village wander through the streets in the dark of the night
caressing the stones and lacing the stars over the harvested
wheat fields where the red poppies had played and sung with the
wind. The square became coated with the stillness of the night,
and a grazing silence enveloped the top of the almond trees,
stirred only by the sound of the striking hour over the
municipal building. It was at this hour that the elderly
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 169
unfailingly sensed the shadowy figure of Edvige returning from
the cemetery along the tall pine trees.
Many a time Edvige had told mother of her encounters with her
dead son; she related his plans to return to the village on
moonless nights. Mother had listened attentively, making certain
to betray no sign of disbelief. “He is too lonely,” Edvige would
confide, “and he misses the smell of the chestnuts roasting on
the fire during the Christmas season.”
Edvige did not miss a day going to the cemetery to assuage
her son’s loneliness. In the village everyone knew the spot
where her son, Miklini, was buried, because the flowers Edvige
had planted there that day had never withered. Neither the rains
of November nor the heavy snows of the winter months could
affect them. However, no one in the village found these
circumstances unusual, knowing, as they did, the special powers
which Edvige possessed to read the ways of nature. The elderly
in the square, who had known Edvige since the beginning of their
memories, felt that it was only a matter of time before she
would find the formula to bring her only son back from the dead.
With this conviction in mind, the village folk took seriously
everything she said, particularly the dreams she related.
Every Sunday, after the midday Mass, Edvige, dressed in her
best attire, sat outside her one-room home, interpreting the
inexplicable dreams that everyone brought to her. These personal
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 170
confessions ended only when the village clock struck midnight.
The last to come to see Edvige were always the future brides and
those at the threshold of womanhood. Edvige knew every one of
them, but she never spoke of their intimate needs to anyone
else.
During his lifetime, Miklini was not aware of his
mother’s special powers. But he did notice, as he played with
others of his age or as he sat on the front steps of the café
where he often listened to the tales told by those who had
returned from faraway places, that people seemed to distance
themselves from him. Miklini gave this no particular attention
until he set his eyes on the face of a young girl more or less
his age. Every afternoon after that first encounter, at exactly
five o’clock, she passed by the café on her way to the fountain
to draw fresh water for her father. The girl had no Christian
name. Her mother, not wanting to offend any of the relations,
simply called her “Dheu.” This was a name no one could find in
any book. Even Prefti Vlasi could not locate it in any of the
Christian name books he possessed. The caretaker of the church
felt that the name was locked in the deepest recesses of the
mind. “Her eyes are like towers of sounds,” he told Prefti Vlasi
soon after the baptismal ceremony.
On a clear autumn afternoon, as Dheu passed by the café, she
blinded everyone else present except Miklini. The latter, more
determined than ever, rose from his chair and followed the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 171
angelic figure which was floating over the cobblestones that
stretched from the café to the edge of the fountain. For many
months thereafter, the two walked together to the fountain,
filled the jug with water, and conversed for as long as it took
without anyone’s noticing the passing of time. From her home,
Edvige had succeeded in locking time inside a terra cotta jug
filled with water and ashes. The potion confused every clock in
the village. The hands marking the hours were unable to
distinguish them, and the swallows encircling the bell tower
froze over the Church of the Dead.
Shortly, Dheu and Miklini were sharing every moment of the day
and night without any villager’s even noticing their languid
desire for one another. But the trees and the wildflowers that
defined the wheat fields on the outskirts of Sheshi brought
forth their very best colors, and their aromas intensified as
the young lovers became ever more intimate.
This love went on for many months, indeed for many years.
Although the seasons came and left with their usual regularity,
only Edvige noticed the small imprints of their presence. The
rest of the villagers, afflicted by a sort of stupor, kept on
living without the municipal clock striking its hours.
On the day that Edvige attempted to lift the veil of
timelessness from the youthful faces of Dheu and Miklini, she
realized that she no longer had the powers of the past. One
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 172
windy morning in late autumn, the people of the village awoke to
hear Edvige howling at the fountain of the ancient fig tree. Her
piercing moans penetrated every house in Sheshi and pulled
everyone into the main square. At the foot of the fig tree, its
bark completely charred, stood Miklini, his eyes wide open. In
his right hand, some divined the most beautiful red rose they
had ever beheld. “As red as the ripest pomegranate,” they said.
Many of the elders, called to witness the miracle, felt that
this was just one more of those magic tricks which Edvige
performed so well. But the younger ones felt unexplained tears
spring into their eyes. For the first time they sensed in that
red rose the other side of things which stays well inside a
person and cannot be shared. The mothers felt that in that
charred figure Edvige had met her own fate; she would be
destined to spend the rest of her days old and alone with no one
to care for her. In spite of numerous investigations involving
dogs and tape measures of all kinds, the authorities could find
no cause for Miklini’s death. Until the day she herself died,
Edvige wandered through the streets murmuring to those she met
that her son was preparing for his return to Sheshi. She made
sure to exhort the people at the café to leave an empty chair
for him.
Within a few years, the people of the town no longer paid any
attention to Edvige. The elders were convinced that her mind was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 173
no longer part of theirs, preoccupied as she was with trying to
forget her grief. But the caretaker of the Church of the Dead,
whose childlike face seemed to have skirted the ravishes of the
town’s clock since he had climbed the bell tower and refused to
abandon it, yelled down to Prefti Vlasi that he often saw Edvige
walk from the cemetery to the old chapel carved under the
mountain with her son. “It happens when I ring the bells for the
six o’clock Mass. The two of them walk as if they were one. Then
they take leave of one another by waving a white handkerchief.”
“The Devil is upon us!” screamed Prefti Vlasi in terror.
Erlind, the caretaker, took care to never relay his observations
or his conversation with the prelate to anyone else. He did not
want to be compelled to descend from the place he called home.
Edvige never missed one of her visits to the cemetery until
the day before Christmas. It was a cold morning with a few
flakes of snow here and there playing with a small number of
swallows that had forgotten their way back to the shores of
North Africa. Edvige had put on her wedding dress, mostly eaten
by moths but still with the memory of the clear blue color that
had caught everyone’s eye during the wedding celebration at the
Church of the Virgin of Constantinople. She moved slowly through
the main square accompanied by the silver light of the almond
trees. Her eighty years fell to the ground as leaves in late
autumn. She reached the fountain and washed her hands but once.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 174
A yellow halo followed her as she moved on, leaving behind an
odor of burned chestnuts. Edvige had roasted them, one by one,
the night before, covering each with oregano leaves just the way
her son had preferred them during the winter nights at home next
to the fireplace.
The news of the approaching death of Edvige, remembered by
some, forgotten by most, spread quickly throughout the village.
In no time, every woman left whatever she had been doing,
dressed in black, and took her place behind the slowly moving,
ethereal figure of Edvige. They formed a solemn, silent
procession behind the woman who had brought each of them to life
and who knew their deepest, most hidden secrets better than even
their closest of kin.
No one found anything astounding in the blue snow flakes that
fell that day on the road that led to the cemetery. The long
line of women grew yet longer as they neared the Church of the
Three Crosses midway between Sheshi and the Abode of the Dead.
The woman kneeled and beat their breasts as Edvige slowly
assumed the shape of the great serpent of her great-great
grandmother. Of all the women present, only the youngest
witnessed this transformation, but she was so awestruck by the
event that fear closed her vocal chords, rendering her incapable
of relating it.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 175
Edvige was laid to rest next to Miklini. In just a few years,
this spot became the place where all the young women around the
village whispered their most mysterious desires. Somehow, word
of Edvige’s death reached faraway places beyond the great
oceans, and it was not long before money began pouring into the
post office of Sheshi. It was to fund the construction of a
marble mausoleum with a fountain inside to keep bright and fresh
the flowers on top of the tomb.
Sheshi tripled in size. It became necessary to build a tenfoot wall to protect the tomb from the ever growing number of
worshippers who came to touch it. Hospices and sanitariums
sprouted like dandelions in the early days of spring. At the
village café, there were nightly complaints about the unending
whistle of the train and the noise from the hourly arrivals of
travelers. The young, dazzled by the looks and the wealth of the
newcomers, stopped going to the fields to till the land. Rather,
they stood in line for hours trying to catch a glimpse of the
new faces on their way to the cemetery. In just a few months,
Sheshi was transformed from a sleepy village into a bustling
town. The train station was given a new look with freshly
imported paint from Mexico, and marble moldings from Carrarra
were added to every door and window. The train platform was
filled with flowers, and small pine trees were planted in light
brown ceramic vases imported from Portugal. In fact, the change
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 176
was so complete that many of the villagers trying to return home
did not get off at the train station at all because they did not
think that it was their stop.
It came to pass that the people of Sheshi themselves had
difficulties in recognizing one another. The strangers coming to
town spent mountains of coins, forcing the store owners to spend
hours counting them each night and to rack their brains for
places to store them safely. Paper money no longer circulated
because the merchants, suspicious of the foreign pilgrims,
refused to accept it. Caravans of mules arrived daily, bringing
sacks of exotic goods from the furthest corners of the world.
Finally the mayor ordered that a large shed with a zinc roof be
built to keep the animals away from the narrow streets and the
open fields of Sheshi.
The elderly inhabitants hid in their homes with their days of
old and their memories refilled with stories, so the wooden
bench under the almond trees in the square remained empty. The
women were afraid to walk through the streets, now crammed with
strangers who spoke by rolling their tongues or by spitting fire
from their mouths. If they ventured out at all, it was when
their husbands accompanied them to fill their jugs with water.
“This pandemonium cannot go on forever,” old Tuci whispered to
Grandfather Zelmi as the two, unique in their boldness, sat in
front of the café. “They will be crushed by the weight of their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 177
coins, and we won’t even be able to give them a proper burial,”
his companion replied.
But the town officials, insensitive to the fears of the
elders, turned off the last few flickering lights, preparing for
the roar of the next day. “I got up from the steps of the Church
of the Dead and took to the road closest to where I had been
sitting so as not to lose sight of Tuci and Grandfather Zelmi
pursued by the fog. Their home was on the other side of the
village. The night seemed in no hurry to reach its resting
place. The square was completely deserted, with only a cat or
two furtively moving along the encircling walls. I could sense
the weight of the silence upon my shoulders and, as the road
grew steeper, I could not move my legs. I searched for a place
to stop and catch my breath, but darkness shaded my eyes.
Awaking, I know not when, I felt the heat of the early
afternoon. “They found you asleep as the field workers were
climbing up towards the chestnut groves,” Mother explained, not
mentioning them by name. The church bells were announcing
someone’s death. “They are ringing for Grandfather Zelmi,”
Mother said in a firm voice. “They found him hanging by the
olive tree last night. May he find a place to rest in the
deepest caves of the earth after all his wanderings.” Thinking
that this must have happened when I had been unable to move my
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 178
legs, I guessed that Grandfather Zelmi could not go through the
fog.
Knowing how much I liked to listen to Grandfather Zelmi’s
stories, my mother had cautioned “One of these days he is going
to fill your head with butterflies that will take you to the
train station and away from home.” When I replied “He has seen
what we will never see unless we leave the village,” Mother’s
face had turned pale. I can still see her distress as if it were
happening today. What frightened her was my determination to
follow in the footsteps of others. She had already lost a
husband and dreaded to let go of a son. “One should stay where
one has first felt the rays of the sun and smelled the dampness
of the earth. Your father has probably lost his way back home.
He has been away too long.”
The church bells rang with renewed force, penetrating through
every opening of the house. Prefti Vlasi tried in vain to
persuade Erlind to come down from the bell tower, but the
caretaker only jumped on and off the bell as it moved from one
side to the other, clinging to it like a vine to a wall. The
ringing continued with even greater passion after the quick
burial of Grandfather Zelmi by the few people who still
remembered him.
Prefti Vlasi refused to allow the coffin into the church.
“Suicide is contrary to nature and therefore sinful,” he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 179
explained to the angry crowd outside his home. “Make certain
that he goes back to the womb of the earth before sunset.” The
priest was concerned that Grandfather Zelmi’s soul would not let
him sleep as it wandered through the village sighing for a place
to rest.
I did not tell them of Grandfather Zelmi’s desire to be
buried next to the barren fig tree which he had planted at the
side of his home because Grandfather Zelmi had taken with him
the secret road to his house. Instead, he was laid to rest in a
remote corner outside the walls of the cemetery. A small wooden
cross marked the spot, with neither name nor age carved upon it.
Years later, as the seasons grew shorter; Sheshi forgot the spot
where Grandfather Zelmi had been buried, for the wooden cross
had decayed without a trace. As the need for space grew, the
guardian of the cemetery attempted many a time to no avail to
break the ground where Grandfather Zelmi rested. “The ground
outside the wall of the cemetery is as hard as a rock,” he
complained to the people in the café. When he observed “We are
going to have to bring in heavy machinery from the big city,”
the others thought he was lying, but the lack of vegetation and
the infrequent rains had indeed turned the ground into stone.”
The bearded old men who sat alone on the wooden bench of the
square had spoken, in the past, of the name of the person buried
underneath the site of the heavy stones, but the name brought
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 180
back no memories. One by one the remaining few who could have
recalled Grandfather Zelmi’s existence had left the village.
Some had taken the train and never returned. Others had sailed
for the fresh waters of the Amazon to mine gold from the shores
of the river. For a long time, the old bearded man who rested
his chin on his wooden cane as he counted the swallows flying in
the sky was the only one left whose memories could bring
Grandfather Zelmi back to life. He had written Grandfather
Zelmi’s name and the date of his burial on a piece of sheepskin
and had placed it inside a blue glass bottle on a day when the
almond trees had begun to shed their leaves. During the last
days of all, protected by the carpet of leaves, old Viti
descended to the ancient cave and hid the blue bottle in the
stream that fed the fountain of the dead. It was the only way to
lessen the sadness of forgetfulness that had been afflicting
everyone in the village. The disease finally made its way into
the placid waters of memories.
“It was during this time that Mother had fallen into a deep
silence. What allowed her to keep in touch with the few objects
still in the house was the letter from Father that the postman
never failed to deliver on the first Friday of the month.
Father’s neat handwriting was what brought her back to the time
of yesterday. The piercing lament heard many times before,
especially in the first year of his departure, had turned into a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 181
feebler moaning. “Your father is getting older,” she whispered
one day as I read the last letter delivered to her. “He writes
with a trembling hand and the paper no longer smells of wild
flowers.”
In the spring came a letter sealed with black asphalt. We were
to go the city asleep under the volcano for medical examinations
and for verification of documentation and eventual entry into
the land beyond the great ocean. The postman, in his best
uniform, had come in person to deliver the sealed envelope. “It
comes from a special office,” he remarked, “and you must put a
cross on the spot where I am pointing.”
In Mother’s eyes I could see a nascent sparkle of the joy
that had been there in the days before Father’s decision to take
my older brother and sister with him to join his own sister in
the promised land beyond the ocean. For a moment the desire to
see her husband and her older children overruled her fear of
leaving the village. “A woman’s place is with her husband,” she
said to me in a voice that betrayed her need to justify leaving
the house.
That night she did not close her eyes. I watched her staring
persistently at the slow-burning flame from the few charred logs
in the fireplace. The night had turned especially cold and the
wind was constantly knocking the window pane against the
balcony. I spent the night thinking of the wild flowers we had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 182
placed over the mound of dirt where Grandfather Zelmi had been
buried. The howling wind must have swept them away together with
the wooden cross. For the first time I felt a cold sweat
descending through my fingers, numbing them. I recalled what he
had told me of the many cold nights he had spent in the big city
of the North. “You will never know when estrangement will take
possession of you. Loneliness and fear always come together, and
they bring the dread of faraway skies. Suddenly you can no
longer feel your fingers.”
Mother had begun to mutter something to herself. I could feel
the vibrations of her wrangling mind from where I lay. During
that night that never seemed to come to an end, I kept looking
for the first rays of sunlight that worked their way into the
house from the balcony each morning. Finally the crowing of the
roosters gave me assurance that the sun had indeed managed to
break through the clouds, sending thousand of ships filled with
butterflies to summon the peasants to the fields.
No longer sparkling, as they had so briefly the night
before, my mother’s eyes had turned black and swollen after
spending so many hours lost in thought while staring at the
burning log. Mother now prepared the usual cup of coffee.
The dusty road that connected Sheshi to the distant wheat
fields still yielded up the piercing cries of the dead German
soldiers. The village lived in dire poverty for many years.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 183
“Milk is for those who want soft skin,” Mother said to us.
Mothers, young and old, fed on wild grasses and sold their
belongings to strangers for a bushel of grain. “Things will
change when the men come back,” the women would say. It was
their way of consoling one another. It was at that time that I
came to distinguish among the people of Sheshi according to what
they were able to buy from those strangers who came to town once
a week. Seeds and anger mixed with a deep mistrust had been sown
in the village. The people had devised ways of greeting and
speaking without revealing anything about themselves. Sheshi had
descended into the cave of deep silences.
The day we received the letter from the consulate from the city
by the sea was the day that the padlock was set on the door to
our home. I myself felt a sort of inner freedom and a sense of
adventure which the people of Sheshi did not fail to see. It
must have been the way I walked through the square and looked at
the almond trees. I had been told not to raise my eyes, not to
look directly into the eyes of others. I always carried a book
with me and looked for places to store the names of characters
that floated through the pages. I can still recall, though my
eyes are now blurred, the snowflakes that danced with the wind
the day we set out for the white building of the foreign
consulate. We had joined the unending line of people from the
village who searched night and day for ways to escape from their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 184
inner prisons and find the secret tunnel through the seven
mountains. The world on the other side of the barrier weighed
heavily on their minds. The desire did not spare anyone. It was
the curse that mothers feared the moment they saw their sons
leave the womb. It must have been what punished Mother as she
sat next to the fire the night we received the letter.
The next morning the sun rose, tinged in red and yellow. The
recently planted wheat fields down the narrow brook glistened
like so many stars shooting their arrows through the hazy
horizon. I had saved the smell of the earth bathed in the early
morning dew in an envelope. The waiting room of the train
station in Sheshi seemed emptier than before even with the four
of us there. Three nights before, I had gone to see my greatgreat grandmother at the very end of the village. I had asked
her to interpret the recurrent dream of a big city with glassy
buildings as tall as the smallest of the seven mountains and
with rivers of people walking in straight lines and with
movements as regulated as those of the puppets in the carnival
that visited the village for two nights every year.
“I know why you came to see me,” she murmured as she continued
to feed more kindling into the fire where a pot of water was
boiling. “I will consult the well of memories,” she added,
“provided that there are no stars in the sky. The light from the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 185
heavens burns my skin and dries my eyes.” After that, she said
no more.
The winds outside seemed to pick up more and more strength. For
the past few years they had grown in ferocity, making the houses
tremble and lifting the trees into the air, roots and all. To
Mother, bad times awaited the village. Her deep red eyes
followed the howling wind through every street of Sheshi.
That night, I left my great-great grandmother’s house with an
inexplicable sense of loss. I had not been able to extract from
her words the interpretation I had sought. In the morning, I
gathered the last figs of the season to take to her so that she
might dry them for the winter.
“I wept all night long with your ancestors,” she cried the
minute I opened the door. “Your grandfather had tears that
carved wounds upon his cheeks as they fell. He fears that you
will be lost on a long trip to a very different land where the
earth won’t taste of anything and the air will smell of rotten
eggs. What is worse,” she continued, “where you are going, the
streets will be lined with mirrors that enclose people,
preventing them from ever getting close to one another. You must
keep your memories alive, for they will prevent the mirrors from
multiplying your image until you can no longer recognize
yourself. I will give you a small pouch filled with a few seeds
surrounded by earth from the waters that spring from the sacred
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 186
cave.”
She pressed my pulse with her hand, fusing her heart
beat with mine. My arm tingled all the way to my neck, as if I
were being bitten by a swarm of bees.
That evening I returned home, determined not to mention any of
this to my mother. The streets were deserted, although the doors
to the homes had been left ajar so that the villagers could hear
the beasts of burden tied to the front wall. The train station
upon the hill was filled with an air of desolation and
loneliness as a few dogs roamed aimlessly along the stony road.
Clouds dipped in wet silences descended from the seven mountains
as the sun began to set.
I thought of Grandfather Zelmi in that remote corner of the
cemetery and of his journey up North. I was, perhaps, the only
one in the village ever to have known of his venture outside of
Sheshi. With regret, I recalled his deep desire to share with me
the bits of his life. I tried to patch together the pieces as
one would struggle to keep old photographs from fading away. In
the distance, the tall pine trees in the sacred soil stood
taller and greener than ever.
Mother had taken in the vases of flowers from the balcony of
our home. We were to leave in the morning for Naples, boarding
the four thirty train from east of the mountains. In the square,
night forced the almond trees to cling together as morning dew
grips thirsty leaves. The women at the fountain basin drew water
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 187
for their laundry. The men sat outside the café as Aristi began
to unfold the chairs for the night’s gathering. The steps to the
Church of the Dead shone in hues of blue and gray which had
provided a sense of security to all who had touched them. Hidden
rays emanated from those stones and traveled through the village
from North to South. The marvel had been told and retold by the
ancients for centuries. “Those steps hold the invisible
footprints of every wandering soul since the beginning of time,
connecting the spirit of the square to the ritual of the jugs
filled with water at the fountain and to the gates of the
cemetery.” The very heat of the stones traveled through
underground brooks, brightening the painted murals on the walls
of the ancient Church of Saint Leonard and protecting the
villagers on their way to the wheat fields.
At home, everything was made ready for our departure. Each
piece of furniture passed down from generation to generation was
labeled to go to close relatives who had come of age to the
surprise of the neighbors. The news spread rapidly throughout
the village that two female relatives were now ready to attract
serious suitors. The white-washed walls of our house, stripped
of the few pictures they had held and of the few pieces of
furniture which had been set in the corners, now looked abject.
Blackened by the smoke from the chimney, the walls shed dark
tears through the crevices.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 188
I gathered the three books I possessed and tied them together
with a shoelace I had saved. The books had provided a window on
the world outside of Sheshi. The long winter days under the
heavy snows had been made shorter and less unforgiving by the
colors and sounds arrayed in their pages. I had promised
Grandfather Zelmi that I would take good care of them,
endeavoring to find every secret they hid. “Those books can show
you the way out of the boredom that afflicts everyone in
Sheshi.” Those words, which, at that time had made little sense
to me, now became the impetus behind the destined journey.
The last night at the house was spent mostly in silence. The
hours seemed to go even more slowly than usual. The bit of sky I
could see from the balcony was a mixture of gray and orange. The
wind which had been bellowing all night long had swept away the
threatening black clouds.
A sharp knock at the door startled Mother from her stupor. My
uncle had come to accompany us to the train station. His
companion, a German shepherd who never left his sight, took his
place at the entrance to the house. “I have come to take you to
the train station,” Uncle Miklini announced.
Uncle Miklini was a man of very few words, a tiny figure of a
person whose name still reminded the village elders of the
horrors of the last war. Everyone knew him in the village
because of the odor of burned flesh he carried with him until
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 189
his death. Father had cautioned me never to mention the war in
his presence. “Your uncle is alive today because of a stroke of
luck,” he told me one afternoon as we watched him walking all
alone towards the hill overlooking Sheshi. “He had been caught
by the Germans and condemned to be shot with thirty-three other
men of the village. He must have fallen before the bullets could
actually reach his body, knocked down by the other less
fortunate men who were felled in the hail of bullets. At dusk,
the German soldiers loaded all the bodies onto a wooden cart and
brought them to be burned in a gravel pit outside the cemetery.
There he was able to hide among the dead and escape when the
soldiers left to fetch the gasoline. On that same day Uncle
Miklini joined a group of partisans in the South. Years after
the war ended the people of Sheshi, who had gone out to look for
him, found him by following a trail of smoking powder. It was
said that he had avenged every one of the men shot and then had
buried the weapon. From then on, Uncle Miklini ceased to speak
with the people of the village.”
Identifying the season through its scent in the air, Uncle
Miklini came down to Sheshi from his mountain hideout once or
twice a year to visit his mother. He still instilled fear and
respect in those villagers who had lived the events of the Great
War. It was during one of those appearances that I saw Uncle
Miklini for the first time. Having stopped at the café to savor
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 190
a cup of black coffee, he sat all alone in the corner. Izmir,
the old man with the eyes of a hawk, who always measured the
height and weight of things from a distance and never missed in
his appraisal, approached me and whispered in my ear. “That man
who sits all alone in the corner is your uncle. He comes to
visit his aged mother and to make certain that he does not
forget anyone in the village. People say that you should not
look into his eyes, for he could snatch the soul right out of
your body. You see how dark his skin is? That is because he has
been to Hell and back!”
Uncle Miklini’s looks did indeed resemble those of the Devil
who never ceased to scream under the foot of Saint George in the
icon opposite the main altar in the Church of the Dead. Women
always made the sign of the cross and closed their eyes as they
passed beneath this image. The young ran in front on their way
to catechism class for fear of being transfixed by those eyes.
The morning of our departure my uncle came dressed in an army
uniform he had taken from a German soldier. During the last days
of the war, the German had lost his way back to his regiment. As
we climbed silently toward the train station, I felt the
piercing edges of the stones lying on the road. The clock on the
municipal building was enveloped by the fading light of the
moon. The houses, still deep in slumber within the last moments
of the night, were unaware of the faint pink hues on the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 191
horizon. At the lower part of Sheshi, flocks of sheep moved like
white dots in search of the little grass that might have grown
during the night.
I glanced in the direction of the cemetery where the night was
still closely packed in black. The tall pine trees, barely
visible, were caped in silence. I thought of Grandfather Zelmi,
still restless in his final resting place.
The bell on the front wall of the station had not yet begun to
ring. In front of the tunnel, a group of men had begun their
day’s work for the railroad. They moved in unison, led by a very
tall man in a black uniform. As he approached the door to the
waiting room, I could see the silver whistle hanging from a cord
about his neck. His stern, forbidding look kept us inside the
room. Our uncle directed us towards the far corner of the place
where a silence, heavy with deep, dark secrets had settled. He
left the door ajar so that we could hear the bell announcing the
arrival of the train. No words were exchanged between my mother
and my uncle as we waited. Their stiff, unflinching eyes chased
away any need for conversation.
The cold, wet breeze filtering in through the door and blurring
the glass with a thin line of vapor made me edge closer to my
mother in search of warmth. A deep feeling of loss was taking
possession of my chest; the tightness only grew deeper when the
bell began to ring. I thought of all the contours of the road
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 192
that led from the train station to the fountain in the main
square. Noticing my discomfort, my mother whispered quietly into
my ear. “Do not show any fear in the presence of your uncle.” I
tried to control my trembling hands, which I hid inside my coat
pockets. “If I could only get a glimpse of the chestnut trees
above the station, I would be able to stop trembling,” I
thought. I had spent many a Sunday afternoon under those
chestnut trees listening to Grandfather Zelmi as he spoke of his
wanderings beyond the village.
“One day you will also feel the urge to leave Sheshi and
traverse the long road as each of us has done.” That morning,
waiting for the train to appear, I was leaving behind the dying
flame of our fireplace and the countless stories searching to
enter a receptive ear.
“We should move to the platform, Uncle Miklini said abruptly as
he took hold of our only suitcase. The bell outside now rang
more insistently, reverberating through the last hues of the
night. Six people in all were standing on the platform. An
elderly couple at the other end huddled closely together and
grasped a white sack knotted at the top. As I looked at them,
the silhouette of the chestnut trees, together with their scent
and the rustling of their leaves, made their way into the
mirrors of my eyes. After so many years, they are still with me,
as vigorous and memorable as on that early morning in 1959.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 193
When the train emerged from the tunnel, the dawn almost dimmed
its front light. The smoke it emitted filled the station with
the smell of burned coal. Typical of the trains in this part of
the country, it was an old locomotive and traveled as slowly as
the people themselves, who were in no hurry to allow their lives
to be dictated by precise machinery. “I will take care of your
house and tend to your chestnut and olive trees,” Uncle Miklini
assured my mother in a steady voice. I had been expecting an
emotional departure, but the fear of betraying any weakness
abated with this uneventful separation.
When the doors to the wagon opened, I saw that the carriage
was almost empty. Seated next to the window in order to see the
lights at the far end of the village, watching out over the
white adobe houses, I recalled Grandfather Zelmi’s saying, “The
lights in Sheshi look at each other as young lovers do when they
see one another for the very first time. They pull you towards
them and fill your heart with nostalgia. It is then that one
realizes that he must come back to the village. That light will
accompany you wherever you go.” Grandfather Zelmi had spoken the
truth. But from the window of the train compartment I could only
see the cemetery lights shining more brightly than any other.
The door closed and a piercing whistle surged from the
locomotive. At the last gate to the station stood the tiny
figure of Uncle Miklini, his shoulders curved as two dry twigs
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 194
by the experience of the last war. He did not lift his arm to
wave a last goodbye, even though I had imagined that the
emptiness of the train station might have gotten the best of
him. He simply disappeared into the undefined colors of the
early morning, and that was the last time I saw him.
Many years later, in our home across the ocean, I overheard my
father reading the letter telling of Uncle Miklini’s death to my
mother. Uncle Miklini had died beneath a chestnut tree in the
field above the train station. It must have been in late August,
for the letter still smelled of lavender. The authorities of
Sheshi had organized a massive search for the old war veteran
when he had failed to appear at the ceremony at which he was to
receive his twentieth medal of honor. They had found his body
three days later in a pool of mud in the chestnut grove. Because
the rains had fallen for two straight days, his corpse was
nearly submerged, head down.
Uncle Miklini’s great Aunt Alba had warned him not to go to the
field, but rather to wash himself with water boiled with basil
leaves. After hearing the dogs bark for nine days and nine
nights, she had seen Miklini struggling against the waters of
the brook down below the village. On that day, she had taken her
final walk from her house to the bottom of the village, aided by
two crutches made by her husband. “Your time has arrived,” she
had warned Miklini, to which he had replied, “You should have
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 195
saved your strength for later days. If you could really read the
stars, we could actually put things in order.”
“I just wanted to have a clear conscience,” Great Aunt Alba had
replied. She had repeated these very words to the village
authorities when they found his body later.
The trip back home had proven much more difficult for the
woman. She had been obliged to watch for the stones and the
stares of the people through their half-opened doors. Very few
of them could recognize her, though, because, while she had aged
just like everyone else had, she nonetheless retained a uniquely
piercing, youthful look.
Great Aunt Alba had stopped at the fountain in the main square
to wash her hands and to cool her forehead. It was then that
she, and everyone else in the village, had heard Uncle Miklini’s
dog howling like a man in agony. “May he finally rest in peace
in God’s arms,” the old woman had muttered as she quenched her
thirst and washed her hands three times. Her family was fast
disappearing from Sheshi. “One day,” she thought, “not even our
name will remain in the people’s minds. They will have to go to
the cemetery to learn of our existence.”
The news of Uncle Miklini’s death soon reached all of Sheshi
and the neighboring villages. Tied to an apple tree, the dog had
kept howling unbearably for two whole days. This in itself had
been enough to convince the townspeople that Miklini was dead;
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 196
after all, they had always seen the two together on every
occasion and at every encounter. “Release the dog and he will
lead you to Miklini’s body,” Great Aunt Alba had advised after
the two days of downpours had brought down rivers of mud into
the village streets.
When the authorities had arrived at the scene of death, the
dog already had licked so much of the mud from his owner that
the men were astounded not only by the cleanliness of the body
but also by the dark blue color of the skin. The dog, sitting
with its feet crossed beside the cadaver, had seemed unmoved by
the approaching throngs of people, who had been beckoned by the
blue of the sky, which seemed to have descended upon the dead
man. Nor did the dog stir when the corpse was lifted from the
water and covered with the clear white sheet which the priest,
certain that the dead blue face was a sign of the presence of
the Almighty, had quickly blessed with holy water.
“God shows His presence in many ways,” the priest told the
people who attended the funeral Mass. The casket was placed
directly underneath the main altar, filled with every blue
flower that the villagers could find. Years later, all those who
had attended the rite could still remember the clear, sparkling
voice of the priest as he sang the “Song of Songs.” His words
were accompanied by thousands of musical instruments that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 197
crowded the top of the dome, although no one could swear to
having seen them.
“I heard the music just as everyone else present did,” each
would affirm at the café for years to come, “but don’t ask me
where it came from. I heard it just as clearly as I now hear you
speaking to me.” Deep down, they all kept on hearing the
strange, soothing music. It stayed with them for years, and
mothers continued to pass it on to their unborn children. The
one who could not forget even one note of that celestial harmony
was the priest.
“We are going to call for another priest,” declared the
President of the Association of Christian Women for the
Preservation of the Memory of the Grief of the Virgin Mary. It
so happened that, since the event of the celestial sounds, the
priest had paid little attention to the women’s confessions on
Friday afternoons, until the women sensed in themselves such a
feeling of uncleanliness as to render them unfit to continue as
members of the association, let alone to be near their husbands,
for fear of further aggravating their precarious spiritual state
of being.
Finally, the vicar of Melfi sent a young seminarian who had not
yet taken his third vow. The vicar wanted to test the young man
and to make certain that he had chosen the right path. The
youth’s blonde hair and rosy skin attracted all the young girls
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 198
to Sunday Mass. The square filled with these young women,
promenading up and down in their best outfits. The men sat on
the café steps alongside the fountain, and when there was no
space for all of them, they even climbed onto the fig tree to
catch a glimpse of the girls. This time, it was the men who were
unhappy with the situation. The women no longer had time to iron
their shirts or to polish their shoes. The children were sent
out into the street while their mothers prepared themselves for
Sunday Mass. In a short time, the villagers assumed a strange
look, and a deeply secretive atmosphere loomed over the rooftops
of Sheshi. Each woman spent the early morning hours before her
husband awoke embroidering her own dress.
As the women’s desire for the young seminarian grew, a sense of
estrangement settled over every home of the village. Husbands
and wives would stumble upon one another in the square without
so much as recognizing one another. “The young priest-to-be has
cast a spell over our women,” the men muttered as they sipped
their coffee. “There is only one way to bring them back,”
asserted the eldest of the group, who had rarely said anything
in all the years he had spent at the café reading the same
newspaper over and over again. Now yellowed and tattered, the
first page held a photograph of a very tall building with a
pointed spear. The rod on top of it seemed to catch the
lightening which arched in a serpentine twist through the sky.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 199
Amidst total secrecy, a few of the men in the café decided to
turn the young seminarian into a night star. They consulted the
oldest woman in the village, and she agreed to prepare a love
potion made of ingredients that no one would be able to trace.
One morning in May of that year, the authorities hung up a
public announcement of the seminarian’s death on the front wall
of the municipal building. Rumor had it that the young man had
been asphyxiated by the first breeze of spring which had nestled
in his room with all the floral scents it could muster. The
women were taken by such sadness that for years to come they
never wore a new dress, but walked in silence with their hair
disheveled. At home at night, in spite of the door’s being
locked, screams and curses filtered up from the street below
through the weather-beaten windows as my father read and reread
the letter from Sheshi to figure out the real cause of the young
seminarian’s death.
“We now live in a land where mysteries are solved with
mathematical precision and where any effect can be traced
directly to its cause,” he asserted with pride. So the letter
was dissected even to its very last sound in order to discover a
logical explanation for the death of the young priest in the
village left behind. Week after week, Father sat next to the
window that overlooked a little green area behind the tall
apartment buildings where each tenant grew his own selection of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 200
vegetables; there, he followed the flight of the few black birds
that glided above the patch of green.
Finally, Father wrote a long letter to the Mayor of Sheshi,
making it known that he had come a little closer to solving the
mystery. His desire to notarize precisely what had occurred to
the seminarian became so overwhelming that he even deprived
himself of the customary walk he took after the evening meal
through the main avenue of the city up to his newly acquired
barber shop. This shop had soon become the center for
conversations in many languages. There the clients even took up
the matter of solving the mystery of the young priest, but
Father soon grew discouraged. Evidently, there were so many
disputes over the many possible causes and effects that the
clients were not communicating. Eventually, Father ceased
altogether talking of the case. His walks to the barber shop
lasted longer and longer.
To ascertain that the shop would still be there, visible
to all, Father left the swirling blue, white and red light in
front of it on. He returned home when the streets became quite
empty. Because the cars were parked along the curbs, the air was
cleaner and the nights were instilled with silence. Nothing
stirred but the remnants of strange voices high up in the
tenement buildings.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 201
“They are the unheard noises left behind by the people who
used to sit on the steps of the building long ago, playing
dominos or simply re-coloring the place with those of the old
memories left behind.” This was Mother’s way of explaining the
incomprehensible voices. She even declared that she could still
make out their faces when she sat with them on the tenement
stoop as a complete stranger. To her, the faces pitted together
on those steps brought to mind the timeless space in the square
of the old village where the flow of the waters from the
fountain mirrored the flight of the swallows through the marine
blue sky. I could see how burdensome it was becoming for her to
maintain the details of the life left behind. Her distant
expressions brought to mind her apparently unemotional
detachment from Sheshi as the train moved slowly away from the
station’s platform.
That expression had become tinged with the colors of fear as
we arrived at the city by the sea. It was very early in the
morning, and the lights on the lamp posts had just been
extinguished. People entered and exited coffee shops in a great
hurry as we followed the signs outside the train station to the
special office set aside for people who needed medical
clearance. I carried our only suitcase, secured in four places
by white string, while my mother gripped my younger brother by
the hand. A porter, a young man with shoes untied and worn
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 202
half-through, accompanied us to the immigration office. He was
no older than I, but he had the look of a very mature person.
Certain and unperturbed, he moved briskly ahead of us, never
turning to see if we were following. But, behind the fearsome
expression, there was the look of a frightened and lonely
being. This was the same sort of look that my older brother,
Rini, had worn when he waved his hand to us as he stepped onto
the train on his way north to work as an apprentice in a big
barber shop. Rini had turned his head back as if he had
forgotten something, and, as the train withdrew from the
station, he was still waving a supplicant goodbye.
I took Mother’s hand as we entered the immigration office.
It was as cold inside as the walls of our house in the village
in the winter. The tightness I felt in my throat that early
morning in the big city by the sea was to remain with me until
the very end of my last memories.
“This is the place you are looking for,” announced the young
guide as he looked straight into our eyes. Over the door to the
consulate perched a white-winged eagle with a shiny black beak.
The floor was immaculate and altogether empty of furniture.
Instead, a lengthy line of people, each grasping a pile of
papers, leaned against the wall of the long corridor. Not a
whisper was heard nor a gaze met among any of them as they bore
up beneath a deep air of apprehension.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 203
We were led into the reception room and asked to separate.
My mother and younger brother were taken where the women lined
up, whereas I was placed in a large room with men of all ages.
One by one, we were lead into a shower room and given a number.
Four doctors, whose only visible feature was the color of their
eyes, examined and x-rayed us. A woman, whose white teeth
seemed to float in the dark cavity of her mouth, handed us a
number of geometric figures to arrange on a table. She counted
from one to ten and quickly removed the box, whereupon we froze
in the thick wall of silence. The fear of failing the medical
examination (and thereby killing one’s hopes of ever again
seeing one’s relatives in the lands beyond the seas) dominated
that chamber. This was the place where dreams were made or
unmade by a simple stroke of a pen on the papers that each one
of us carried so carefully from desk to desk. No one knew what
the papers contained.
At last, we were led before the person in charge of the
final approval or rejection. Leaning over the documents, he
mechanically scanned them beneath his black eyebrows. No words
were exchanged. Whatever feelings could have existed…and I am
certain that they had to be there…were utterly subjugated. It
was then and there that I first sensed the coldness and the
mantle of isolation that enveloped each official in the office
of immigration. The grey of the endless corridor, undecorated
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 204
by a picture of any kind, augmented the aura of indifference
that followed us as we moved from one room to the next.
In the room where they finger-printed us, rolling one finger
at a time on a paper with ten boxes, the clock marked one
o’clock in the afternoon. Bigger and more imposing than any
piece of furniture in that windowless room, its hands moving
from line to line, the clock provided the only sound, albeit a
distant ticking. We gasped for air.
There were nineteen other new arrivals of all ages. Their
looked different from the people I had seen in the main square
of Sheshi, and their language, so diverse from person to
person, did not sound like mine. I was discovering a world that
I had not even known existed beyond the seven mountains. I
remember feeling a strong urge to speak to the man next to me,
a man with unusually large hands and curved fingers. But all I
could manage was a far away smile to which I received no
response. Among the man’s apparent preoccupations, one loomed
largest: to secure the stamp of approval on those carefully
guarded documents.
From this place where I now come to sit in the late
afternoons to watch the automobiles slip by, I remember that I
never did manage to speak to any one of them. I would have
liked to know where they were going and what places they were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 205
destined to reach. But perhaps, just as I could see no further
than the gray walls in the corridor, neither could they.
I wondered how Mother was faring. More than five hours had
passed since we had been separated. What weighed on everyone’s
mind was the possibility of being rejected, either for
harboring an unknown disease or for failing to place those
geometric figures into their proper spaces quickly enough. The
humid afternoon that had slipped into the room from the
corridor began to feel as heavy as the doctors’ furtive looks
as they passed in front of us while we moved from room to room.
The crushing silence was only interrupted occasionally by the
clacking of typewriter keys, the noise of which cut deeply into
the bodies of those who, not daring to make a move for fear of
doing something to disturb the order of things, stood immobile
in their assigned place. The hands of the large clock on the
wall moved implacably, with no apparent concern for the anxiety
that the room was exhaling. For a while, I followed the
movements from one second to the other, counting until my mind
drifted away to the unfamiliar sounds of the sea waves as they
slammed against the rocks of the seaport.
The morning of our arrival, the guide had walked ahead of
us, turning around, at times, to give us a faintly discernible,
distant smile, as if he wanted to say something but could not.
Something kept him in an aura of isolation. Of course, the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 206
privacy of his demeanor only encouraged my mother’s desire to
get closer to him to discover the cause of the sadness that
lodged in his eyes. Now I realized that the city that was known
to write songs with the sounds of the waves was other than what
those sounds concealed. A small puppet theatre in the
neighborhood revealed its deep melancholy perhaps better than
did the throngs of people buying and selling. In the small
boutiques, the multicolored artifacts, gently shaped in so many
different forms and painted in colors extracted from the
surrounding countryside, contrasted sharply with the broken
bottles and crumbled papers that littered the street.
The consulate building, with its marble entrance and gray
shutters, was surrounded by a tall iron fence. Around it,
countless people with deep blisters on their legs did not pay
any heed to the stench that had settled upon them. It was then
that I understood that the penetrating sadness in the guide’s
eyes was a kind of melancholy that went beyond the desire of
the sea waves to snatch the colors of the countryside. The
eternal imprint of misery and desolation upon the city that
endured its pain silently while it made others sigh with love
shattered the dreams of hordes of people who embarked for
unknown lands. An intense heat had settled on the marble
building like nets left to dry on the rocky beach that girded
the city. The blue sea water, which quietly caressed the rocks
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 207
with its foam, went unnoticed by the fishermen lacing together
the broken nets. Small boats, collecting the sun’s rays which
arrowed the sea and spread upon it thousands of stars, sailed
towards the horizon.
In the corridor of the building I sensed the imposing
presence of nothingness and the impossibility of sharing a
common existence with those present. By now, the smell of a wet
wind had invaded the room where twenty of us had been left
alone, each with documentation in hand and a number hanging
from his neck. Some were younger than I was; others were much
older. I often thought of the impenetrable world that each of
them hid and felt an urgent desire to get to know the events of
their existence. The deep lines that crossed their foreheads
testified to their age and sensitivity to the needs of others.
One clean-shaven man particularly attracted my attention
because of the ceaseless twitch of his left eye and the
cracking of his fingers. He appeared to be the eldest in our
group. He remained throughout the whole ordeal as inscrutable
as the measured looks and movements of the doctors who examined
us. His fingers moved faster and faster as the clock ticked
like a knife cleaning blood from an open wound. The image of
the young guide leading us to the immigration building had
slowly faded away as one of the doctors opened the door to our
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 208
room. An array of eyes followed the creaking sound of the door
as it topped the pangs from the heartbeats of the twenty of us.
I was given a second set of documents and told to line upon
the right side of the room. The only one who remained behind as
we were moved into another room across the long corridor was
the old man with the wrinkles and the twitching fingers. I
would gladly have switched places with him. I learned
afterwards from the person standing in front of me and to whom
I had addressed not a word, for he appeared cloaked in fear,
that the old man had been rejected because he was suffering
from trachoma. It was not the first time he had been rejected.
He wanted to see his wife and children, who had crossed the
wide ocean and traveled through many horizons to work in coal
mines. “There,” the person in front of me added, “anyone can
work who is not afraid of the dark and the black dust that
gnaws at your lungs with every breath that you take. He will
try again soon with the hope that a kinder examiner will take
pity on him. In the village they say that he gets the strength
to go on living from the daily wait for the letter from the
Immigration Office to be examined again.”
From the window of the room I could see the tall, massive
ship docked. Dozens of dockworkers moved the merchandise along
wide concrete pavement just as so many little ants carrying
away bits of leaves to store underground for the winter. The
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 209
sun was setting far away where the waters met the sky coloring
the surface with a rosy mist. I was still thinking of the old
man who would not be taking the trip with us, but the others in
the room had dispelled the gloomy look from their face and were
looking at the sunset with its glow in their eyes. The promise
of a new land with a new life and a secure future for their
children, embedded in them by countless others who had
traversed the same road before, had gotten the best of them.
There was no argument that could dissolve those nurtured images
in them. They knew precious little of the harsher life that
awaited them and that would ultimately consume every vestige of
humanity that they carried with them.
That evening I saw my mother with a faint smile on her lips.
We were given a new number and a large yellow envelope with all
the necessary documentation for embarkation. The line of
people, with all the belongings they could carry, stretched for
as far as the eyes could see. They looked like so many sheep
descending from the barren hills to the village, leaving behind
a burning sunset. The people, like the sheep, followed the
scent of the cave where they could spend the night and hope to
climb even higher the next day for greener pastures among the
rocks.
My mother had said very little. She held my brother and me
close to her as we waited for the signal to embark. The olive
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 210
trees on the nearby hills sloped in terraces shone with
thousands of silvery leaves beneath the last rays of the sun
before plunging into the sea. From time to time, like white
silhouettes, dots of peasants could be seen pulling their
animals of burden by the bridle downhill towards the barely
visible rooftops of the villages.
The silence that reigned in the long lines of people waiting
to see the gate to the side ladder of the ship open rendered
almost audible the footsteps of the peasants descending from
the hills.
I could sense the pounding of my mother’s heart as she
attempted to cover my younger brother with her mantle to
protect him from the chilly breeze of the approaching night.
The line was a procession of tiny figures clustered together to
guard the few belongings tied to their back. With eyes
downcast, they moved toward the tall ship with mountains of
bright lights. They were attracted to it like fish to the
moonlight. The city behind us was asleep; the few lights left
on for the night were the only indication of a city in slumber.
The ship’s lights floated in the sky like so many stars
searching for a cradle in the infinite darkness.
We were directed into cubby-hole number six hundred sixtyseven, more a crypt than a cabin, with three beds stacked one
on top of the other. The middle-aged man who traveled with my
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 211
brother and me was to get off at our first stop. He was filled
with trepidation. “I am going to the heart of Africa to work in
the gold mines,” he said, his voice faltering at every
syllable.
The ship sailed past midnight, leaving behind the lights
fading into the darkness of the sky. Those were the last words
I heard from our cabin mate. In the morning, just after the sun
had reached its highest point in the sky, from the third-class
passenger deck, I saw a small boat approach and then leave the
ship, bearing one extra person. Although we had said nothing
more, I presumed that he knew where my family was going. There
was a tacit understanding among all the passengers not to be
too inquisitive for fear of multiplying the uncertainties that
each of us felt.
The small boat sailed away, partially hidden by the high
waves. The fading image of the passenger, his collar turned up
to protect himself from the wet wind, was quickly engulfed by
the perfectly sustained rhythm of the rising and falling
waters.
Soon after, it began to drizzle. At times the pungent
raindrops turned into snow flakes, only to melt as they touched
the surface of the deck. Red flags were placed on every door
that led to the deck because of the approaching storm. They
were expecting heavy winds. The young pressed against the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 212
windows of the enclosed deck space, watching the waves hurl
against each other.
From the other side of the transparent wall sat the firstclass passengers. The men were all dressed in black tuxedos.
The women, with their long dresses and unusual hairdos, thin
and pale, vented multicolored fans and drank from elongated
glasses. The sound of music that seeped through the invisible
divide brought to mind the organ music that made the paper
angels come down from the vault of the main church in Sheshi on
Christmas Eve. The figures behind the glass wall bent and
straightened to the rhythm of the music, revealing only
measured smiles and controlled hand movements. Beyond the
enclosed deck, the thickening fog suffocated the feeble cries
of the ship’s lifeboats.
The crossing was to take ten days, but it soon became
difficult to count them. The deck where the third-class
passengers were permitted to linger for a bit of fresh air and
a quick glimpse of the sky gradually emptied of people. The
sickness and the smell that was caused by the choppy sailing
spared no one. Dark grey clouds raced alongside the ship for
days. At dusk, they could not be seen, but the deep, dark roar
surging from the depths of the ocean told us that they were
still with us.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 213
At the corner of the enclosed deck, a passenger was seated
with his legs crossed. He smoked nervously. An older person
wearing a blue sailor hat approached the table carrying a chair
which he had dragged from a nearby table. The two men seemed to
know each other. The younger man quickly extinguished his
cigarette and made room for the visitor, who removed his hat
and placed it at the far edge of the table. Like the young man,
he was dark with an aquiline nose and light eyes, illuminated
ever more brightly by the light fixture shining over the table.
Soon a paper was spread upon the table, but I could not
decipher the writing. The waves beat furiously against the
ship, which sailed, unperturbed, from wave to wave.
Both men looked about, as if expecting the arrival of someone
else. I took another glimpse at the table and noticed a map
spread over it with deep lines where it had been creased
repeatedly. “This is where the city of Chicago is,” announced
the older man as he pointed to it. Many years later, that name
was to become familiar to me. My presence, which had clearly
become evident to both men by now, was of no concern to them.
The older man pointed out to the other just where Chicago lay
in relation to the city that was to be the port of entry for
all of us. The younger person turned around and repositioned
the map as he strove to visualize the place circled in pencil.
“A man dressed in black will be waiting for us when we
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 214
disembark. The train we will be taking, I was told in the
village, moves as swiftly as a snake under a pile of hay. We
will be at our destination in two days after our arrival at the
port,” added the older man, with conviction.
I learned days later on the ship that most of the men carried
with them a signed contract to work in the meat-packing
industry. Forty per cent of their salary would go to the agency
which hired them for the duration of the contract. I got as
close as I could to listen to their conversations. “I was
told,” said another of the group, “to put a cross at the bottom
of the page where he held his finger, even though I could sign
my own name.”
I could see that each of them was trying to reassure the
other while at the same time showing as much firmness as
possible under the circumstances. “Chicago,” he continued to
say without being able to hide the fear in his eyes, “is a city
that reaches further than the last horizon visible from the
highest hilltop of the village. The place is lit with countless
street lamps that stand as tall as our trees in the square, and
the people, many a time, cannot distinguish between the day and
the night. There is great abundance in that land that seems to
float on top of a sea of green grass.”
In silence, each man was reliving the day of departure and
jealously guarding that invisible pack of dreams that was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 215
sustaining him in his voyage. Every now and then, the younger
men in the group glanced at the ocean from the windows of the
enclosed deck, even though they knew very well that it would
reveal nothing. One of them could not resist the temptation to
divulge what the man he shared his cabin with had said. “In
Chicago there are places where men and women gather to drink.
The women are dressed like the ones one sees in a magazine.
There, they even bring drinks to you, and there is always
enough money left to tip them.” The dark chestnut eyes of the
young men who listened to this tale shone even more brightly
than the chandelier that hung above the enclosed deck.
But the older men with distinct olive-copper skin did not
seem to partake of that delight. In their minds were the wives
and children they had left behind with only scant provisions
that could last no more than six months. After that, they would
be at the mercy of their relatives until their husbands and
fathers could send some money. The letter from the consulate
took from four to five years to arrive. Within it was the
permission for families to rejoin their men in the new land. If
complications should arise with the Immigration Office in
Naples, the last resort was to leave everything up to God, with
the intercession of the priest. And, indeed, it was not unusual
for people in the villages, for reasons of human nature…be it
envy, hatred or pure malice…to send anonymous letters to the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 216
Immigration Office denouncing those waiting to rejoin their
husbands or brothers. When that happened, rejection followed
without explanation. Dreams came suddenly to an end for many
divided families. They spent the rest of their days in anger
and distrust of everyone else in the village. Some even went so
far as to take revenge on those whom they imagined had sent the
anonymous letters. The fact was, however, that the secret
remained a secret forever, while it consumed those afflicted by
it and nurtured those who had perpetrated the act. This was the
very thought that afflicted the older men in the group and kept
them from sharing the pleasures, mentioned with such zeal by
the younger ones, that awaited them in the new land.
The one with the copper-colored skin took out a cigarette
which he had carefully folded in a pale paper. The younger one
provided him with a match. Puffing nervously upon the cigarette
which he held in a trembling hand, the elder man looked
intently at the others and added: “It is best not to swell your
heads with vanities, but rather to think of those who have been
left behind.” But the younger of the two, determined to allow
nothing to diminish the pleasure of an illusion, remained dead
silent. “We should get down to our cabin,” the older man
admonished. “The ship seems to be swaying more than it did this
morning.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 217
And, indeed, the sea had swelled to greater heights. Darkness
had engulfed the enclosed deck. Three loud whistles summoned
the passengers down to their cabins. The ship was completely at
the mercy of the high waves which rushed with great force and
precision against it. The waves hammered against the cabin’s
tiny window all night long.
I thought of the rainy days in Sheshi in the last days of
November. It was the month to remember the dead. Mother had
begun to knit a woolen scarf from chunks of sheep’s wool, which
she had turned into fine yarn. The heavy rain beating against
the windowpane did not perturb her.
A few weeks before, she had celebrated the arrival and
baptism of her youngest son with neighbors and relatives. A
long wooden table had been set up on our street. It was covered
with sliced whole wheat bread, aromatic green olives and dried
black olives. Hard cheeses, aged during the previous year,
stood next to smoked sausages and freshly-picked chestnuts. A
wooden wine cask was placed at each end of the table. Mother
was as happy and as proud as a young mother with her firstborn
child as she cradled the baby, whose every article of white
clothing she had stitched by hand. This was one of those days
for celebration which brushed aside the pernicious travails of
the villagers’ daily lives in the fields. Even the sparrows
dared to snatch some of the hay, set out in bales to dry, and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 218
spirit it stealthily up to through the clouds of the
approaching winter sky.
The crowd patiently awaited the arrival of the priest from
the nearby mountain church to celebrate the baptism with the
holy water brought from the monastery between the mountains of
the two-headed eagles. A young man who had just come of age was
sent to the highest hill of the village to announce the arrival
of the holy man by ringing a copper bell. On that day, the
priest had set out from the monastery before sunrise. He had
decided to take the shorter route through the deep but shady
ravine. He was determined to be on time for the ceremony and,
thereby, to dispel his reputation for stopping at every tavern
located at the nine crossroads that connected the monastery to
Sheshi. But it was not to be.
This time, however, it was an encounter with a stranger that
held the priest back as he hastened towards the village. That
afternoon, the heat was exceptionally intense, as it had been,
in fact, for the entire week. The cicadas had returned to rub
their wings, and the ants had completely invaded the fruitbearing trees, attracted by the irresistible sugar dripping
from the pruned branches. This would in the end prove to be
their last intoxication. A cold wave followed which froze them
solid to the bark of the fruit trees.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 219
“I was detained by the Devil,” asserted the priest. “He took
the form of a beautiful white owl and spoke in Latin, turning
his head around with every word. He said the following, “Nasce
te ipsum, por memo me impune lacessit.”
This phrase angered the people even more, for their inability
to understand it convinced them that they were being made fools
of by the priest. So shaken was the priest by the encounter,
for which he had been waiting ever since the day he had taken
his vows for the priesthood, that he could have sworn to his
superior that the owl itself forced his hand to tremble as he
poured the holy water over the child’s head. Yet, he felt
overjoyed that he was able to fight off that temptation; even
more, he believed that the encounter proved his dedication to
the church had not been in vain, for the Devil really did
exist.
That was the last time the people in the village saw the
priest sober, even though he had refused every effort by the
guests to have him taste their special wine. He had seemed
strangely at peace with himself, smiling with the candor of a
young child to everyone who acknowledged him. The last person
to see him leave the village, oddly enough by a road that went
all around the village only to end at the same place it began,
was old Viti.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 220
“The priest never came back after the second time around. I
waited for him to come back for the third time, but he never
did. The sun had already settled below the lowest of the seven
mountains, turning the sky into a red cauldron.” Old Viti was
to relate this tale for the rest of his life as he sat among
the others on the wooden bench of the main square watching the
swallows silhouetted between the sky and the water basin of the
fountain.
“Your younger brother is God’s creation,” Mother always
reminded me as she set aside the last piece of hard bread for
him. She would soak the bread in water, chew it and then place
tiny pieces of it in his mouth. “The celebration of your own
baptism went well into the night,” she said to me with her
usual look of pride. “You were the biggest baby the village had
ever seen, so we baptized you just a few hours after your
birth. The priest was afraid that God would call you back to
your place in Heaven because of your round, rosy face, your
high cheekbones, and your light hair.”
The day that Father departed from Sheshi…a day that seems so
long ago at this very moment…he told Mother to keep his
children close to her skirt. At the same time, he asked me to
keep a close eye on our house. Neither Mother nor Father shed a
tear. The train emerged crowned with the black smoke from the
tunnel. The three passengers climbed the steps to the carriage
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 221
and the train quickly departed, as if it wished not to prolong
the pain of separation.
The only person who showed any emotion was the
stationmaster, who took out his checkered handkerchief and
pretended to wipe the dust from his eyes. Much later, I learned
that he and Father had sat next to each other on the first day
of school in one of the rooms of the richest family of Sheshi.
The schoolroom was and remained for many years the only one in
the village. The trainmaster, whose name everyone in the
village had heard but no one could remember, kept a list of all
those who left the train station for the distant lands across
the ocean. The long list included the day, the hour, and the
family name. The only thing that was missing was the final
destination of each passenger. Years after his retirement, it
took months for the stationmaster to read the names of those
who had left the village to the curious ones at the café. Many
of the young wanted to know the names of the family members,
what they looked like, and whether they would ever come back to
the village. “If you want to know their faces, go to the
cemetery. There the faces are cloaked forever from the effects
of the cold and the heat.”
As the years went by and blindness seized the trainmaster,
the need to recall the moments of the silent goodbyes at the
train station became the main weapon in the struggle against
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 222
forgetfulness. The children of Sheshi thought of him as the
blind old man with a black cap who read from a long list of
names, at times only to a few people, but mostly to himself.
One clear morning in early April, with the sky filled with
thousands of swallows, the owner of the café found the
trainmaster still seated in front with his arms crossed and a
streak of blood hardened by the cold mountain breeze. He had
died from a stone thrown by a group of children who made fun of
his unstoppable mumbling. It was never discovered who had
thrown the fatal rock, and since no one came forward, the
authorities closed the case. But they forbade the children from
ever again playing in the square of the main fountain and from
lighting a candle at the tomb of the trainmaster for the rest
of their days.
For the old men of the village, who occupied the wooden bench
across the fountain in the square, this was a bad decision. The
children’s presence in the square brought them back memories
and filled their eyes with pleasant reveries that blurred the
passing of time and loosened the pain which gripped their
joints. “Sad times will make their home in the village,”
commented the oldest, whose wrinkled eyes left no doubt of his
age. “The authorities, protected by their secluded offices and
the machines that puff air from their bellies, have been given
too much power by the officials of the big city beyond the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 223
seven mountains,” added a second elder with conviction. All
together, the elders decided to no longer follow the movement
of the clouds that foretold rain, nor the patches on the moon
at its fullest stage that told them when to plant the seeds.
The eager young peasants and the municipal officials were at
a loss as to how to remedy this very peculiar situation. They
consulted with the higher office of the big city and with all
the almanacs they could find around a wide perimeter of the
seven mountains. To their astonishment, they found out after
months of research that they could not read beyond the
scribbling on the page. The tiny symbols in black and red ink
were more like numbers which multiplied on the page as they
jumped from one square to another. They soon realized that it
was impossible to learn from the symbols when to turn the earth
and seed it or how long a wait there should be before the
harvest. What was even more troubling was the realization that
the elderly, who never missed a day on the bench facing the
fountain, were nowhere to be found. The officials blamed one
another for their lack of attention to their grandparents and
for not knowing their hiding place. The mayor mobilized the
whole village. Every able-bodied man and woman was promised the
best seat at the center of the stage during the grape harvest
festival if they could retrace the steps of the elders and
report their findings to the municipality.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 224
To no one did it occur to consult the children of Sheshi, for
neither the priest nor the mayor was aware of the invisible
link, made up of all the spider webs the young could find at
the entrance to the sacred cave (which many still said the
village sprouted like a flower) that tied them to the memories
of the elders. “It was not long ago that the streets of Sheshi
were filled with artisans working in front of their shops and
the square was filled with hundreds of children playing from
sunrise until sunset.” Sheshi had become a desolate place since
the day of the decree that punished the children.
With the approaching days of winter, the women were convinced
that the village was living its last days. On their own and in
the utmost secrecy many of them had begun to make lifelong vows
to the village’s ancestors in the cave at the bottom of the
ravine. By now, the constant dripping of water from the ceiling
and the unbearable humidity had infested the sacred chamber
with bats with long black wings. From the center of the
ceiling, only the outstretched hands of Saint Leonard, with
their white nails and terra cotta colored fingers, were
visible. The younger ones at the threshold of womanhood flogged
themselves until their chests bled with rivers of blood that
lessened the pain that consumed their bodies from the inside
during the hours of the night.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 225
Sheshi was covered by dark clouds that rained down drops of
sadness in the early morning hours. The people who lived
outside the only road that led to the main square of Sheshi
would remember for years the smell of sorrow that spiraled up
from the chimneys of the homes and made its way down to the
sacred cave of the ravine. For a long time, the entire village
remained isolated with no one being able to enter and no one
able to leave. The people of Sheshi became estranged from one
another; secretly, they blamed each other for the disease that
was afflicting each of them.
Only the forced resignation of the whole executive committee
and the coming snows persuaded the elderly and the children,
after long discussions on the banks of the winding brook, to
decide to start the journey back to the main square of the
village early the next day. To accompany them, the oldest of
the elders summoned all the snails around the edge of the brook
to bend the tall grass and prepare the way for their return to
the village. The children gathered all the berries they could
hold in their hands and fed them to the swallows as they
whirled around and in front of the caravan.
The first to notice the return of the birds was the whitebearded shepherd who tended his flock on the hidden side of the
mouth of the brook. There, the waters were cooler and the
grass, taller. He cherished this secret with his watchdog, who
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 226
first led him to the lush greensward. Now the dog barked and
ran from beneath the legs of the sheep, waking the shepherd
from his slumber under the mulberry tree. The shepherd saw no
need to send the dog to inform the villagers.
The ringing of all the bells in all the churches of Sheshi
filled the sky with thousands of swallows. The birds swirled
around the bell towers, catching as many of the sounds as they
could. The joyous occasion snatched away from the villagers the
veil of sadness that had descended and remained over their eyes
for many months. Life in the village slowly came back, and with
it, memories of a not too faraway past. The women hung their
best embroidered canopies out of their windows or over their
balconies. Never had Sheshi seen so many different designs and
colors adorning the front walls of the homes. The almond trees
were dusted and carefully pruned before the first breezes
arrived from Africa. The door to the Church of the Dead was
left open for thirty-three days and nights. The twelve saints
who lined the knave of the church were garlanded with homegrown flowers, the first violets of the year. The ousted
members of the municipality were made to not only clean the
wooden bench where the elderly had sat before their departure
from the village but also to add to it a leg-stretcher for
their tired limbs.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 227
At midday everyone gathered at the crossroads between the
cemetery and the sacred cave to await the arrival of the
caravan of the very old and the very young. The clock on the
tower of the municipal building struck twelve times with
unusual clarity. Years later it was said that the sounds had
even pierced each of the seven mountains.
At the Church of the Blessed Mother, the priest found himself
all alone praying at the mid-point between the day and the
coming of the night. Prefti Vlasi did not mind that at all. It
gave him the chance to be alone with the crucifix behind the
altar, where he swore he saw drops of blood oozing from the
wound of the Savior. He only mentioned the occurrence to his
sister, who, while much older than he, had been his companion
and confidante since she had found him. The return of the
elders from their hiding place freed Prefti Vlasi from the
agony of being unable to help the villagers with their planting
and from the burden of providing them with answers as to why
they had disappeared in the first place. His many prayers and
supplications to the crucifix had not supplied him with a
logical answer. The joy of the people of Sheshi became Prefti
Vlasi’s joy, for a heavy weight had been lifted from his
shoulders. So, the day of the returning caravan found the
priest kneeling in front of the main altar. He heard every
sound from every corner of the village.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 228
Prefti Vlasi had always possessed those strange powers that
allowed him to descend through the infinite layers of sound. He
had never shared his secret with anyone. Only his mother was
aware of it, and the knowledge brought much apprehension to
her. One winter evening she attempted to reveal her son’s
powers to her husband. “Your son,” she told him as she added
the last stitches to his last pair of socks, “can hear what no
one else can and can see inside of things.” Her husband did not
at first totally grasp what she was saying. “What do you mean,
he can see inside of things?”
“He knows the way to the people’s heart,” she replied. That
revelation filled his father with an uneasiness that from that
moment on prevented him from looking straight into his son’s
eyes. Prefti Vlasi’s father had never been a religious person
and there was no place for the Church in his circle of friends.
That winter night he responded to his wife’s confidence with
nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders and the dry sound of
an uncaring voice. It was another side she had never seen of
her husband. Now he remonstrated, in the voice of a total
stranger, “It is all in your mind and in those fables you have
filled your mind with.”
Yet, deep down, he knew that his son had a special sense. He
could see it in the ways he identified objects and in the
detailed perception he gave of what they held inside of them.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 229
This suspicion was verified when he saw a throng of butterflies
weaving a garland around his son’s head and spreading a pungent
odor that kept the house smelling of spiders’ eggs for days. Of
course, he related nothing to his wife; but, from that moment
on, he did nothing to interfere with his son’s desire to share
Jesus’ agonizing hours on the cross and to share those feelings
with anyone who touched his hands.
Soon after, the beginning of stigmata appeared on the palm of
Vlasi’s right hand. That is how, at just ten years of age, he
was taken to a monastery on the other side of the seven
mountains by his father and mother. The trip by mule took two
days. There, after a long climb by foot in the early hours of
dawn, they came upon a massive gray structure that perched on
the tallest mountain. Its walls and high towers were reflected
clearly in the volcanic lake far below. A rope was sent down
from the lower section of the monastery to bring up the new
novice. A loud voice from the hill behind the left tower
ordered the mother not to come any closer and to veil her face.
The mother felt as if she were being stripped of her most
precious possession. The young novice felt a deep urge to
embrace his mother and to tell her that she would always be
with him along with God.
For that temptation alone he was placed in a solitary cell.
The isolation lasted for a complete cycle of the moon. Three
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 230
times a day he was served a slice of bread and a glass of
water. The monk designated to watch over him opened the eye on
the door of the cell three times daily. Prefti Vlasi tested his
will on the first day of confinement. His closeness to God
helped him to overcome the few remaining memories of his
family. The blind friar assigned to lead him along the path of
light lessened the gentle pain of the uncertainties.
Prefti Vlasi’s perceptive powers were revealed to his
superiors one hot summer day as he and his mentor were seen
going through the mount of rocks to set free a gush of muchneeded water. From that day forward, the Abbot of the monastery
took him under his wing, ordering his monastic cell to be
filled with the sacred books of the library. Indeed, the abbot
was convinced that Prefti Vlasi could show the others the
entrance into the Aleph, that mother of all sounds. The onceblind mentor urged Prefti Vlasi to reveal to no one the fact
that his sight had been restored; he wanted to search for God
from inside the beauty of a flower. In fact, the mentor and
Prefti Vlasi became so close that the other friars had
difficulties in distinguishing one from the other, either by
sound or by scent.
Since Prefti Vlasi’s arrival, the monastery had become a
reservoir of grains and dried fruits. Whatever the young novice
touched simply multiplied three-fold. It did not take long
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 231
before the peasants living in the valley below noticed the
constant smoke from the three chimneys of the monastery and the
increased height of the grain silo. The news that vast stores
of grain existed in the monastery spread quickly to all the
forgotten villages of the area. Soon the friars in charge of
provisions were subject to men of all ages and colors who
constantly knocked at their door. Following the silent prayers
and the daily meeting, every friar participated in a vigil to
discuss the ever-increasing number of people coming to beg for
food. The young novice was asked to use his special powers to
increase the yield of wheat and potatoes.
The demand was impossible to meet. Worse still was Vlasi’s
realization that his powers were actually waning. Distressed,
the future priest was now convinced that he was living in sin.
His will to control both his power and his pride had been
tested; unaware, he had fallen prey to them. In their place he
now felt the fear of losing God’s grace.
It was at this time, exactly eleven years and three days
after his arrival at the monastery, that his mentor advised him
to gather his few belongings and leave the premises by the left
side of the wall adjacent to the chapel. The night, Prefti
Vlasi remembered, had been moonless. A terrifying silence fell
from the sky with the large snowflakes. He was given a Bible
and was told, after a brief embrace, to read it nine times a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 232
day and to seek God’s forgiveness for his arrogance ninety-nine
times daily. The door shut quickly behind him. The deep urge he
felt to turn around and wave his hand at his mentor died with
him years later in the deep freeze of winter under a white
mantel of silence. And now, as he prayed in front of the
bleeding crucifix he was to realize that his failure to see the
changes had been his punishment. Prefti Vlasi was destined to
live his life in isolation until his sister, after years of
searching for him, was able to rescue him from his loneliness.
In a dream as clear as the sky on a sunny winter’s day, her
mother had spoken to her. “Go to your brother and look after
him. He is in need of us. Stay with him until God summons both
of you.” The next day, without telling anyone else of her
dream, she took her old boots, her father’s umbrella, and a
hard piece of bread and began the search. It was only after
many more winters that a group of wandering Albanians searching
for the land of the two-headed eagle was able to help her find
the crooked bell tower where her brother served as a Prefti.
“He knows you are coming,” the eldest of the Albanians assured
her. “He is reminded of your arrival every night, but he has
grown old and may not recognize you at first. Do not be
disheartened. He will know in due time that you are his
sister.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 233
And that is how she reached the village on top of a steep
ravine barely visible from the small church of the crooked bell
tower. The elderly Albanian with the half moon-shaped white hat
took leave of Prefti Vlasi’s sister with nothing more than a
piercing look into her eyes. “We will have to cross the narrow
sea to get to the land of our forefathers before the cold winds
climb over the Carpathian Mountains. This is the place where
you will be stopping.” A fierce wind from the deep crevices of
the ravine prevented her from hearing his words clearly, but
she did note from him the kindest smile. It recalled to her the
smile she had seen in her mother’s coffin as she had placed on
her the bouquet of white roses.
The caravan of Albanians vanished amidst the dust raised by
the carriages. She walked towards the front entrance of the
chapel and asked the old man leaning with both hands on his
cane which road to take to reach the village on top of the
ravine. He lifted his gray-veiled eyes and, only after seeing
her resemblance to Prefti Vlasi, did he tell her to take the
road to the left where the pomegranate trees grow. “Do not take
the one where the old cypress points to the sky,” he
admonished. “It will take you to the cemetery that lies between
the olive groves.” In the distance she could make out both of
the trees; they seemed to be very close to one another, as
lonely as the parched land surrounding them, and they were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 234
buffeted forcibly by the wind. It was a wind which appeared to
bother the old man, standing with his eyes closed, no more than
the arrival of a stranger had.
From the hilltop, Prefti Vlasi’s sister could see the entire
village. Sheshi stretched lazily from the lower ridge to the
foot of the tallest of the seven mountains. In the middle, the
main church, with its round bell tower, swelled like the belly
of a sheep, dividing the village into two parts. Below the rows
of houses, dozens of caves carved into the volcanic ridge
displayed their chimneys, which sprouted directly from the
earth like so many minarets. On the left of the road, just
below the pomegranate grove, she noticed a small cave turned
into a chapel. In its depths stood a small altar with three
wooden crucifixes in a dark color. Across from the cave there
was a wide rectangular wash basin, where two women in head
scarves did their wash in silence.
It was a hot, sticky afternoon. The few dry shrubs that
painted the scenery appeared to be suspended in the air. The
only sound was that of the cicadas who inhabited a lone almond
tree that stood agelessly amidst the dry grass. For a moment
Angelina--- for that was Prefti Vlasi’s sister’s name---was
filled with doubt. “I wonder if he is going to recognize the
same blood that flows through our veins,” she pondered. In the
old days the people would put all their trust in blood when it
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 235
came to settling disputes. She remembered her father saying
that blood had its own way of setting things straight. Little
did Angelina know that Prefti Vlasi had known for years that
she would come; he had spent every afternoon sitting on his
balcony that overlooked the pomegranate grove just above the
Chapel of the Virgin of Constantinople. “One of these days she
will come;” this was the mantra he repeated to himself day
after day when he closed the door to the balcony for the
evening.
Prefti Vlasi knew everyone’s footsteps and gestures from
afar. On the afternoon of Angelina’s arrival, however, he had
succumbed to the desire he had felt all day to take a rest.
Since the early hours of the afternoon, he had struggled to
keep his eyes open. He had tried to dispel this persistent
drowsiness by having more than the usual cup of black tea, but
this ploy had worked for no more than a few hours. He had
decided against a third cup, though, convinced that it was no
use to delay what his body was naturally demanding. So, when
Angelina arrived at the steps of the main church of Sheshi,
unseen by anyone, her brother was fast asleep. It was one of
those rare moments when his mind was completely blocked out.
Angelina banged the bronze lion’s head against the metal
button the door and waited to catch her breath. The moment she
had waited so long for had finally arrived. She could feel her
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 236
mother’s happiness inside of her, just as she had always felt
it as a little girl. Prefti Vlasi awoke after the third knock.
Upon opening his eyes, he knew that his sister’s journey had
come to an end. He descended the stone steps with a smile he
could not hide. “Finally,” he thought, “I will have company for
the coming winter months.”
He turned the door handle, trying to avoid its usual screech,
and was for a second confused as to whether it was the mother
or the sister who stood before him. “I have come to take care
of you,” she said in a suffocating voice as she tried to
control her tears. She had been born during the first year of
his novitiate. He now recalled the picture of his mother he had
guarded in his mind for so many years. “I have prepared some
tea,” was all that he could manage as they tearfully climbed
the steps toward the balcony. Prefti Vlasi felt a deep void
inside of him thinking how much his sister had aged and how
much clearer his memories of the past had been when the friars
would sit all together in the cloister of the monastery waiting
for the sun to set and to spread its rosy colors into the sky.
The last letter my father received from the village described
in detail the profound changes that his sister’s arrival
brought to Prefti Vlasi. “The priest has not celebrated Sunday
Mass since his sister, Angelina, arrived in Sheshi,” my father
whispered to my mother. From my study, which
opened onto the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 237
kitchen, I could hear every sound. “The village should proclaim
Prefti Vlasi a saint for all he has done to keep the memory of
God alive,” my mother insisted. Years later, when I entered my
mother’s world of memories, I learned what really had happened
to Prefti Vlasi.
I recall it was the month of the deep freeze which followed
weeks of one snowstorm after another. During one of those
storms I was forced to spend the night and most of the next day
at the house of one of our relatives. As I sat in his study,
enclosed by a book and by a long rectangular writing desk, I
was given a letter to read which Doni, a distant cousin on my
mother’s side, had received some time ago.
“Now that you are here,” Doni said, “I would appreciate it
if you could read this letter for me. I know it is not from my
sister, for I do not recognize the scribbling on the page. Doni
knew each book by the color of the print and the design on its
cover. It had been his life-long desire to learn how to read
and write; in his old age, he had convinced himself that he
would accomplish his goal. He had spent years looking for and
buying books unique for their cover design. For that reason,
the collection he had amassed followed no straight line of
thought or discipline. Among them were a fine group of classics
that I enjoyed leafing through to relive the magic of the
written word.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 238
Doni’s books were his greatest prize. He would dust each one
daily before he sat down to his cup of hot tea and lemon. That
morning, through the partially unfrozen window, I could see a
clear white sky. The snow sparkled as the sun’s rays hit upon
the tall banks lumped by the strong winds of the previous
night. The world outside the window stood still, encroached
only by an occasional flight of a few seagulls that had
wandered in from the nearby ocean. Doni handed me the envelope
and added, “I have a feeling there is some bad news written
there. I have been dreaming of my sister ever since the postman
hand delivered this letter to me. I could even see a distant
sadness in his eyes that barely prevented him from saying
something to me.”
And, indeed, the bad news was enclosed within the very first
sentence. “It fills me with sadness to have to tell you that
your sister Emira has gone to join your mother and father.” I
did not know how to break the news to Doni, but he was able to
read it anyway in my hesitation and in my eyes. I went on to
the next sentence. “You should be happy, for Emira died on the
same day that our priest, Prefti Vlasi, departed from this
world with the light of God circling his head. It is believed
that your sister was taken to Paradise by Prefti Vlasi.”
In an instant, silence settled into every empty space in the
room. “She has been the umbilical cord for me,” Doni muttered.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 239
“She brought our village into my house with every letter she
sent.” And then he admonished, “In this land, you must keep
your mind filled with the memories of the past, for there is
nothing in the present and total oblivion awaits the future.”
Years later I was to recall those very words while the hours of
the day searched incessantly for the distant horizon.
I left Doni’s home without saying a word. He had returned to
dusting his books anew. In the streets, people were moving from
place to place intent upon not touching or even coming close to
anyone of the other pedestrians. Any mishap was quickly
followed by an automatic apology, which was taken as a deserved
indemnity for the person’s having suffered a violation of his
private space. I thought of the miracle, mentioned in the
letter that had occurred during the funeral procession for
Prefti Vlasi.
“The main square, where the fountain brings the cold water
from the seven mountains, was filled with people from as far
away as the two blue lakes with the mirroring image of the
monastery. The children of Sheshi were all dressed in white
like so many angels, and each one carried a white rose. A
caravan of priests in black robes spread incense, filling the
air with the smell of charred chestnut wood. As the procession
reached the crossroad that cuts the village into four sections,
a divine event took place. There was not a person in Sheshi who
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 240
did not see Prefti Vlasi being lifted from the coffin and
carried towards the setting sun by two fiery angels sowing
stars. For days people prayed at the place where the miracle
had occurred. More than a dozen people were trampled trying to
touch the coffin where the body of Prefti Vlasi had been
positioned for three days and three nights. The pillow,
embroidered by the women of the village and placed beneath his
head, was installed on the altar of the main church and was
declared a relic by the Bishop of Melfi. In the confusion that
lasted for nine days and that had caused uncontrollable
convulsions in many of those present, they forgot to bury your
sister. It was only when the people began to smell the
decomposing body and saw the almond trees in the square
attacked by white worms that orders were given to bury the body
deeper than usual in the family plot of the cemetery.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 241
Chapter Six
I had left Doni shrouded in silence. The news that his sister
had not received a proper burial at the proper time hardened
his resolve to burn all the letters he had ever received from
Sheshi. I had left him seated at the window with his eyes fixed
on the falling snow. The snowflakes shone even more brightly
against the deep darkness of the sky. Nothing could be heard
but the softening layers of snow taking their place on top of
one another.
From the end of the avenue I saw the light in our apartment
building. It seemed to vanish in the distance with every step
that I took. “I left the light on to guide you home,” said my
mother as she opened the door. I told her of the news Doni had
received from the village.
“I knew of Prefti Vlasi’s death and
that of Doni’s sister for a while,” she announced with a tone
as indifferent as the darkness of the sky to the whiteness of
the snow. “I have been dreaming of both of them for months,”
she added. “I even told your father, who dismissed the dreams
with his usual comment. ‘If everyone believed in your dreams,
time would move backwards and we would all suffer from
boredom.’”
That was during the longest winter in memory. It kept people
home for weeks. I struggled to keep alive the sound of the
elevated train as it approached the avenue near the pier where
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 242
the tall ships with their round windows waited for the weather
to break so that they could sail on. Each family in the
neighborhood had taken refuge in their subterranean cell, and I
wondered if they, as we, were rescuing their memories floating
on top of the snowflakes.
My mother lived in our new home as if she had never left the
village. Her gestures and expressions were deeply embedded in
the place where she had been born. But time spares no one. As
one winter replaced another, growing only in ferocity, I saw
the vanishing of the old world and the coming of the new one
like a storm in the midst of summer. The change ravaged and
spread the plague of the loss of memory without recognizable
traces.
Our apartment was like all the others in the building. The
only distinctions were the numerals attached to the door and
the number of stairs dividing the five floors. One corridor
always led into another ever narrower corridor. The families
who dwelled in the apartments were rarely seen. Each took great
care to lessen the noise before opening their door in the
morning and closing it behind them upon returning at night. No
one even attempted to know the neighbors living on the same
floor.
And so the days and weeks came and went like all the rest. We
had waited four and one-half years to be all together as a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 243
family; yet, the only day that happened was Sunday. The long
separation from our father and our older siblings---a
separation which would leave its mark on each of us---was now
replaced by rigid hours of work with very little time to spare.
This schedule forced the family members to be attuned to their
own clock.
Mother was growing ever more taciturn by the day. We all
knew what ailed her, but no one dared to bring it into the open
for fear of shattering the feeble economic security that had
been achieved. The obscure ailment that would not allow her to
forget the village and her relatives was slowly consuming her.
The traces of the malady could be seen in the wrinkles
clustered about her grayish eyes; her ever present expression
of sadness made it clear that she was totally removed from the
objects which adorned the apartment. An invisible exile had
begun for her. I knew that it was going to grow like a monster,
and that it would devour all those who attempted to decipher
the causes of its cancerous growth.
Winter gave way to a month of heavy rains. The streets turned
into rushing rivers during the day and sheets of ice at night.
Strong winds followed, eradicating the weakest trees that lined
the avenues. From the front window of the apartment, I caught
sight of the few blurred images of people daring to look out of
their own windows. I thought of the swallows in Sheshi,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 244
swirling relentlessly around a lone rain cloud, trying to catch
a few drops of water. Here a marked desolation crowned the
pigeons clinging in clusters along the electrical wires
connecting one tenement building to another.
In the Jewish grocery store across the street, they had just
turned off the lights. In just a few months, the lights would
go out permanently, once the grocer realized that not even the
experience of the concentration camp--- still present in the
serial numbers on his right arm---was sufficient to fortify him
against the street gangs which were proliferating. One such
group, whose members were known for the blue tattoos along
their own arms, repeatedly held up the store in broad daylight.
The assaults, accompanied by the brandishing of bats and iron
chains, had become such a ritual that the authorities were at a
loss as to what to do. So, on a clear spring day just before
sunset, the man with the black beard and the blue numerals on
his right arm locked the door to his grocery store and, without
looking back, never returned to the neighborhood. A few weeks
later, I overheard two of the tenants in our own building
mentioning that the owner of the grocery store had suffered a
stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak.
I had watched that grocery store for hours while waiting for
my father to return from his barber shop. Looking at the
elderly couple in the grocery store going about arranging their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 245
produce in the morning and storing it again in the late hours
of the day, I thought of the artisans in Sheshi with their
workbenches outside their stores. The Jewish couple had seemed
ageless. They seemed to have come from a place no one could
locate on any map of the world. Their gestures and their habits
seemed unlike those of all the people who entered and the left
their store.
Different groups of people came and went from the
neighborhood. Most of them left quickly, taking the unique
colors and images that had been visible through the windows of
their apartments. Others remained only to undertake the
struggle of preserving the changes which they themselves had
brought. Somehow, the Jewish couple had appeared to be above
all of these constant changes, even as they gave the impression
of having something of each of the diverse groups that
inhabited the neighborhood.
The closing of the grocery store did not seem to be of much
consequence to many of the neighbors. Indeed, it was not long
before it was replaced by another, easily identifiable by the
exotic fruits and the medicinal herbs that the new arrivals
used as incense in their religious rites. This time, however,
there was only one clientele. The customers spoke a language
that was easily turned into music. Soon enough, the
neighborhood was filled with notes from heretofore unfamiliar
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 246
instruments. The old timers packed their belongings by day and
made their way out of the neighborhood by night.
Our home became as quiet as the midday hour. It was then that
Mother began to draw the shades of all the windows facing the
street. Life outside quickened; the traffic on the avenue
increased in volume and speed. People rushed about as if they
were about to miss a train at any moment. This fast new rhythm
was meticulously organized and controlled by an invisible
hierarchy that ruled from inside the workplace; it gave people
no chance to develop roots of commonality with each other. Our
home, much as that of every other family, became an enclosed
compound with insurmountable walls that kept everything alien
outside.
The conversations which my mother and father shared over a
cup of black coffee after dinner suddenly came to an end. My
older brother and sister, whom we had not seen for four years
and nine months, had grown estranged from the village. We were
all clearly drifting apart.
My sister, who had not yet come of age when she left Sheshi
with my father and older brother, had put aside the woolen doll
she herself had made. Now she played with it only when she was
alone in the apartment. She sat mending the winter clothes next
to the window overlooking the street. The day after
disembarking, she had gone to work as a seamstress with my
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 247
aunt. She had learned the trade as a young girl in Sheshi, just
as her ancestors had done for generations. Awakened by my
mother daily just before the crack of dawn, she prepared lunch
for everyone else with her eyes half closed. Then, with
darkness still hovering over the tree tops, she went out to
meet my aunt.
I remember my aunt’s reminding my father about the child
labor laws. “She is too young to work with older people,” she
scolded. And although he would reply, “They cannot tell her age
because she is too mature and a good seamstress,” my father was
secretly trying to save as much as he could to take the whole
family back to Sheshi. He did not want to offend his older
sister, who had sponsored our immigration with her life’s
savings.
It was not long before we all became aware of Mother’s deep
sadness. She tried to hide it by keeping busy with all kinds of
chores, which, at times, she would undo just to have something
to do. But she could not contain a furtive smile when the
monthly letter arrived from the village. She struggled against
the inexorable passing of time that was sapping her strength
and building distances between herself and her children. One
night, as they took their usual places by the window facing the
back of the building, Mother told Father, “One of these days we
are going to be left alone. You are too busy with the barber
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 248
shop to notice how fast our children are growing and how
distanced they are becoming from one another.”
My father’s answer belied the depth of his own anguish. “A
home is made to prepare others to make their own. It is best
that you make peace with that and help them to learn to build.”
This was just the kind of reply that my mother dreaded to hear,
but she did not argue. She had been taught never to contradict
anything that her husband might say. She knew the fine line she
was meant to walk. It had been handed down by her mother and
inculcated even more forcibly by her grandmother, whose wisdom
was nowhere in evidence in her own daughter.
Two winters had gone by since our arrival in the city. I had
discovered the magic of books and the power of the written
word, albeit in a new language. The entrancing beings who lived
among those pages finally became my companions in the struggle
against the deep loneliness and alienation I had begun to
experience. With their help, the world outside our apartment
felt less threatening, and the geometric designs I saw in the
architecture, where my clouded eyes sought a place to rest and
a point of contact, were slowly revealing their inner feelings.
I sensed a ravaging silence emanating from the walls of the
tenement buildings. I knew that, with time, it would only grow
thicker, eventually depriving me of the space necessary to
breathe.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 249
I began to yearn for the arrival of the evening hours when
everyone gathered around the dinner table at home. I noticed
that the hour had become that time of the day that everyone in
the family desired to witness, even though they never said so
aloud. After five years of working in the sweatshop, my sister
met the one with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.
From that moment on, she rarely sat with the rest of the family
at the dinner table. She spent the remaining hours of the day
sitting and mending close to the window overlooking the street.
She took her place there at six o’clock every evening and only
left it when the darkness would prevent her catching a glimpse
of the person who had entered her life.
My mother had become aware of the scar her feelings were
opening in her demeanor even before she had taken up her perch
at the window, but she made no attempt to thwart her daughter’s
passions. Having entrusted her with the responsibility of
caring for my father and older brother when she was just twelve
years old, my mother realized that the awful separation had
confused her daughter’s sense of childhood irrevocably. Indeed,
my sister continued to make woolen dolls until late in her
life, when she ran out of places to hide them. My mother’s
admonition to her served no purpose. “The day you decide to
bring home this young man will also be the day that you get rid
of your woolen dolls.” I do not recall my sister’s ever giving
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 250
an answer. After clearing the table and putting away the
dishes, she ran straight to the window, which by now was filled
with boxes of red rose petals.
Even today, with my eyes as cloudy as winter skies, I can
still smell the scent from those rose petals that brought to
the window all kinds of birds from faraway places. Some of the
birds, attracted by the floral aroma and deceived by the thick
fog that descended into the street in early fall, crashed to
their death through the windowpane. It happened in the early
days of fall when the leaves of the trees lining the street
confused them, throwing them off course from their route to
warmer places. One morning Mother found the room filled with
dead birds. She took it as a bad omen. She urged my sister to
wear a collar of fresh garlic cloves and to stop looking out of
the window. “Make certain you have all the pieces to complete
your dowry instead of wasting your youth building wells of
passions,” she told her daughter one day as she was about to
take her customary seat.
The only time my sister could be persuaded to leave her post
was the hour of my father’s return. Pulling down the shade the
minute she saw the bus turn onto our street, she would join us
at the dinner table, clinging to Mother as a chick to a hen.
But when dinner was followed by the usual conversation that
recounted the events of the day and the news from Sheshi, my
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 251
sister would move her fingers nervously beneath the table.
Pretending to follow the conversation, she would allow her eyes
to settle anxiously on the window sill. In the reflection of
the sun, slowly fading away, I saw rose petals weave a bridge
between the window and the shining mirrors of her eyes. Her
cheeks, dipped in the colors of the sunset, radiated the glow
of a smile barely visible on her lips. Beneath the window of
the apartment, leaning against the lamp post, stood the humble
figure of her future husband gathering the messages as they
made their way along the bridge of red petals.
My father came and went from the barber shop with the ebb and
flow of the seasons. He never saw the figure leaning patiently
against the lamp post unaware of the changes in the sky. But my
mother was happy to see in her daughter the same hidden powers
she had witnessed in her own grandmother as a child. On a
spring day, with the park on the next street carpeted in
violets, the flat was invaded by a flock of blue butterflies.
The sky was tinged a dark blue color never seen before in the
neighborhood.
“Your grandmother has found us,” Mother whispered softly to
my sister that early spring day. “She has come to be present at
your wedding. Make certain that from now on you leave a glass
of water and a slice of bread on the night table for her to
quench her thirst and fill her stomach. She will be staying
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 252
with you until you are with child. My own grandmother did the
same with me.”
My sister did not question Mother’s assertion. Each day she
rose before sunrise to see that the water had been drunk and
the bread eaten. She filled the space around the night table
with the most beautiful flowers she could find and devotedly
replaced those which withered. But my sister did not actually
see our grandmother move about the apartment until the night
before her wedding. As she retired that night (I can still see
the full silver moon bathing on a lone cloud from the kitchen
window) I heard Mother tell her that the time had arrived to
make preparations for the person who had been watching over
her.
“Wash yourself with the special soap I made for you and spray
the holy water I brought from the village on the four walls of
your room,” she advised. Before closing the door to her room,
my sister put away her dolls, placing them one by one inside
the wooden chest at the foot of her bed.
Father had returned home earlier than usual that night from
the barber shop. The customary letter writing to Sheshi took
most of the evening. No one ever dared ask him to whom he wrote
those letters. Years afterwards I searched in every closet of
the apartment and in the deepest recesses of my memories for
the name of the person destined to receive those missives. The
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 253
search was fruitless until the very end of my days, when the
name appeared before my eyes as clearly as the first star in
the sky, although the sound of that name died within me.
Someone, whose name I could not recall at that moment, had told
me that Mother sealed the envelope containing the letters with
wax and placed it inside the coffin so that Father could finish
writing them whenever he could on the other side of the dark
wall. It might have been my great aunt who told me, for she had
nurtured Father since the day of his birth and returned to
prepare his departure from this life.
I remember that fall afternoon I had been placed on the
front porch of the house with a brown woolen cover over my
knees. I followed the clouds as they drew moisture from the
winding brook. It was going to rain. It must have been close to
twelve o’clock when I felt my lids drop tightly over my eyes.
With my right ear I barely heard the clock come to a halt. A
bright light emanated from a deep tunnel. It turned the air
into a heavy silence. An array of timeless faces made their way
from the end of the tunnel like so many fading stars. Longknifed fingers kept the faces away from the countless flower
buds from which tongues of fire sprayed flashing stars. A wind
came fluttering from the depths of the sky, sowing flocks of
bluebirds. I clawed into the memories of the past.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 254
The day before my sister’s wedding I had told my mother of a
persistent bad dream. “It was not a dream,” she had calmly
explained as she cleaned the kitchen table. “Your grandmother
came to stay with us after journeying through many lands and
seas for fear of being forgotten by her family and the people
of Sheshi. Times are changing faster now than at any other
time.”
Years later, as I sat on the porch with the brown cover over
my knees I was to realize how heavy a burden forgetfulness can
be if there is no sound that laces together the moments of
silence. “A dead person,” Mother had said that morning, “can
only find peace in the mind of those who will nurture their
secrets with remembered details.” I felt that Mother was
completely aware of the details of my dream, and I did not
pursue it. “Don’t even attempt to relate the dream to me,” she
then added.
”It is useless. There are no words to relate that event. No one
has ever been able to cross with open eyes into the realm of
burning light.”
So I pursued the matter no further. I decided, instead, to
select those sounds, among those with which I was familiar,
that could reveal to me the inner working of the dream. With
the arrival of our grandmother, my sister had ceased to be a
child. She acquired the habit of keeping the house orderly, and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 255
she stayed away from her dolls. In fact, having taken over all
the chores, she became the center of all things in the
apartment. As for Mother, she retired to the softness of her
rocking chair where she had begun to crochet a woolen blanket
with ninety-nine squares, no two of which were alike. Years
later she went on to make woolen slippers as soon as the first
cold winds of fall began to blow. But a veiled look of sadness
appeared in her eyes that could not be seen during the late
afternoon hours. I thought it was the end of the day that
saddened her, gnawing ever closer to her bones, but, as I
spread the woolen blanket over her knees, I heard her complain
that she could no longer battle an intense feeling of boredom.
“I am unable to reorder my memories as I try not to lose them.
They seem to fade away from me, to the point that I do not even
recognize them sometimes.”
I assured her that I would gather all the photographs she had
brought with us or received from the village. “It is only a
matter of identifying the pictures and writing a date on the
back of each. That is the way to prevent the bridge from coming
apart.” In response, she closed her eyes and fell asleep. I was
never to see such a peaceful expression upon her face again
until the last days of winter, when spring was ready to burst
with new sounds and fresh colors. A short time later, the
photographs that I had gathered for her from all the drawers of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 256
the apartment became the steps that Mother descended and
ascended, showing only a furtive smile every now and then as if
to demand more information about the pictures. She touched each
photograph, feeling every contour. In no time, she was able to
order them chronologically in her mind. She left an empty space
between the photographs brought from Sheshi and those taken in
the flat since our arrival.
Father spent hours with tears in his eyes going through the
photographs with Mother every night. He spoke at length about
each one, always hoping to notice a smile that would indicate
her recognition. They both had changed so much over the years,
which weighed upon them ever more heavily with each passing
season. Father’s dream of saving enough so that we all could
return to Sheshi slowly slipped away as he struggled to pay the
mounting medical bills.
“It is a gradual deterioration of the liver,” one of the
doctors attending her ventured to say in a language Father
struggled to understand. “The liver will eventually wear itself
out,” added the doctor’s assistant. The cold tones of the two
professionals created in my father a feeling of helplessness
that was to mark him for the rest of his years. But it was the
nurse’s demand that she be paid even before she made her
examinations that made Father visibly angry. “These people have
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 257
hearts of stone and the selfishness of hyenas,” he sputtered as
we made our way back home.
Thus began for Father a growing sense of disillusionment that
grew to silent frustration as he watched his family come apart.
A few years later he was to shut his eyes completely to
whatever surrounded him. As days came and went, he fell deeper
and deeper into a profound stupor.
On the other hand, my sister took hold of the house and
began to arrange things in her own way. The wedding date was
postponed. She announced her decision with unwavering
determination. “My mother will get better very soon, and we
will have plenty of time to set a new date. It will be only a
matter of months.”
This, then, became the point of conversation as they spoke
with each other, she from the window of her room, he leaning
against the lamp post. Little did he know that he would grow
old waiting night after night with admirable patience, always
clothed in his best suit and shiny yellow tie, just to get a
glimpse of her. That was all that he needed to gather the
strength for the next evening. He spent the morning washing and
ironing the yellow tie. The whole neighborhood knew when it was
time to look for him at the only lamp post in the street. The
perfume that he wore forced all the neighbors to open their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 258
windows so that they might take deep breaths of the rosy air
that spoke of love of old.
“If you don’t stop languishing, I shall close my window
forever,” my sister told him one rainy evening. “You have
become the laughingstock of the neighborhood!” I could not hear
his answer. The wind and the rain had picked up speed, and an
agonizing howling had taken over the night. That was the last
time I was to see him. He had just begun to pluck the petals
from the bouquet of flowers he had brought with him. Later I
learned that he had continued to wait beneath the window for
years, even though my sister closed the window and secured it
with long silver-colored nails. She erased the wedding date
from her mind and dedicated her youthful years to saving from
forgetfulness the memories of the family.
The clocks in the house were set to six in the evening, for
it was the only hour that Mother could recognize. That was the
hour when the men of Sheshi returned from the fields and the
women set the table for the evening meal. Day after day she
relived the same moment on the clock, yet she always approached
it from a different angle.
Sister had assumed Mother’s personality. The only thing that
separated the two was the number of wrinkles on each one’s
forehead.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 259
By this time I had ventured beyond the front steps of the
tenement building. The grocery store operated by the Jewish
couple had disappeared. The only thing that remained of it was
an old aluminum sign with illegible letters crisscrossing one
another like so many geometric figures.
The benches from Saint Mary’s park a block from Jackson
Avenue had finally lost their battle against the cold winter
nights. Tall grass had invaded the once neatly kept lawns, and
every cavity was filled with discarded Coca-Cola bottles. The
tall cement wall where most of the young men of the
neighborhood played together by hitting a small pale red ball
against it had crumbled, leaving only the corroded steel beams
standing. The signs at every entrance to the park spoke of the
sadness of the place. “Closed to pedestrians. Violators will be
prosecuted.”
The park had been the breathing space of the neighborhood
enclosed by the fast-moving car lanes on both sides of the
area. The benches that once had known so many retirees, each so
different from the other in appearance and gesture, had
vanished, taking with them the worlds of old that the elders
had secretly protected in the most intimate recesses of their
memories.
There had been one old man who had stood out from the rest.
In his hands he held a necklace of wooden beads that he touched
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 260
as he recited some kind of prayer to himself always in the late
hours of the afternoon with the sun about to set. Next to him
lay a book of prayers and an old newspaper. From time to time
he got a pen and a sheet of paper from his pocket and, after
lifting his eyes towards the blue of the sky, he wrote a series
of signs that looked more like scimitars than letters. His eyes
would finally settle on the wall where the young men hit the
ball with all their strength.
By the end of October the trees that lined the street that
led to the park had just a few leaves still hanging from their
branches. The dark clouds that appeared with each passing day
were the first harbingers of colder days to come. Still the old
men would not stop coming to the bench that faced the cement
wall, although only a few young men continued to hit the ball
against it. The elders sat in silence while securing a cane
beneath their crossed hands and watched them play handball.
A few of the hardy ones kept on coming to the park until the
first frost blanketed the benches in white. I always wondered
how they spent the long winter months with snow storm after
snow storm that kept even the younger ones at bay in their
homes. It was at this time that fierce storms came down from
Canada and turned every window in the neighborhood into an icy
mirror on which the sun’s rays sculpted white stars. On that
day I was to go to City College for an interview. I was barely
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 261
able to hide the feeling of elation that I felt in receiving
the letter, but I did not break the good news to my family.
Mother had been enclosed in her own distant world for quite
some time, and my sister had taken complete charge of the
family. Father, still bent upon saving all he could to take his
family back to the village, lived for the barber shop.
I had tried before applying to City College to work at a
textile industry in the garment section. In Sheshi I had been
an apprentice to a tailor during the after school hours. The
factory owners in their dark long suits were complete strangers
to me. They looked unlike any other people I had ever come
across before. The putrid air that circulated in the place with
hundreds of sewing machines, one moving faster than the next,
aroused in me the deepest nausea and at the same time a feeling
of sadness at seeing the operators of the machines moving like
so many controlled puppets. Sweat rushed down their faces.
Their posture betrayed the anxiety of those living in fear
after a forced separation from familiar faces.
I thought of Tuliuci and of the many afternoons I had spent
in his tailor shop. His words to me, as he fed the black raven
in the wooden cage he himself had made from wild bamboo
filaments, sounded as true to me now as they might have been to
him at the time: “The city with the buildings that pierce the
sky that everyone dreams about in the village and hopes one day
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 262
to reach, is pure hell. There people are placed in large rooms
as big as the biggest wheat field along the brook, and they
work from dawn until sunset. The air they breathe sticks to
their skin like the pitch that falls from the pine trees in
early September.” The workers, their eyes fastened upon the
flying needles, were mostly women. Although their features were
distinct, an invisible sense of their solidarity seemed to
unite and defend them from the hawkish glances of their
supervisors, who strolled back and forth down the center alley
of the factory floor.
I was placed at a machine in a far corner of the shop; to my
right was a small window, its glass cracked. The rooms I could
peek into from where I sat seemed no better than the one we
occupied. What I saw was the same cage with the same fake green
on the window sills. At the end of the day, as the sky
darkened, I told the supervisor that I was not coming back. His
response was an immediate burst of anger. “I need you to check
for any imperfection in the suits you were working on!” he
shouted. His was the sort of anger that I had only encountered
in the stray dogs that searched for scraps of food on the
outskirts of our village. He followed me to the exit of the
factory, screaming at the top of his lungs.
The air outside felt fresher than it ever had before, even
though it was laden with humidity. I walked for hours,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 263
following street after street with signs that changed little in
color until I reached a small park and sat down on the only
bench. I watched the birds pecking frantically at bits of food
left behind by the children who had been playing there. Pitch
darkness fell quickly upon the place, followed by a silent
drizzle that escaped even the sense of touch.
I drifted back to my first day in school in Sheshi. A feeling
of lightness had taken hold of me, and it demanded no
explanation. In the classroom the air smelled of almond
flowers. The soft drizzle falling gently bathed each flower on
the tree outside the open window. Ten of us sat on the first
two rows of chestnut benches; our black uniforms with white
collars lent us an air of orderliness. The schoolteacher, who
came from the snow-capped mountains of the North, wore a smile
that no one in Sheshi had ever seen before. Within just a few
weeks, the teacher had gotten to know each of us in such way
that there was no secret in us that he did not expose. There
was no one among the ten of us who did not wish to please him.
“We have to rebuild what the war has destroyed,” he reminded
us at the beginning of each lesson. The schoolteacher was
unlike any other person in the village. He told the village
authorities that he was from the city in the far western part
of the country. His hair was bleached by the sun, and
his
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 264
light eyes were like those of the people painted by artists of
an age long gone but whose dreams are still with us.
To the women of Sheshi, the schoolteacher was an angel sent
by God to lead the children on the path to Heaven. “Do not even
try to find the place he is from in the geography book of
Prefti Vlasi,” the women whispered softly to one another. “He
is not of this earth.”
The sun from behind the seven mountains was casting a long
shadow over the village square. It was in early October. The
grapes were ready to be harvested, and the leaves on the olive
trees had turned bright silver. The gentleness of the
schoolteacher’s movements and the whiteness of his hands had
become the talk of the women at the wash basin of the fountain
in the square. The schoolteacher walked and talked in the
square with peasants and landowners alike, a behavior that
pleased some and angered others. The peasants sought his advice
when it came to selling their grapes and olives to the
merchants from the big cities of the North. In just one cycle
of time, he had won their trust away from the priest or the
doctor of the village. At harvest time, he calculated the
amount of their produce and the percentage they owed to their
landowners. Even the medicine prescribed by the doctor would
not be taken until the contents and the dosage were verified by
the schoolteacher. Until then, the people of Sheshi had only
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 265
resorted to seeing a doctor if the old woman of the village
could not identify the ailment that afflicted them. “God wants
you to keep Him company. There is nothing that I can do.” That
was the answer she gave them when she could not isolate their
illness with the right mixture of herbs. But now my classmates
whispered in the schoolteacher’s ear, “My father wants to know
if you can come by the house after dark without anyone’s seeing
you.” He never failed to satisfy their wishes or to put their
mind at ease. He had learned how to fulfill their needs without
threatening the delicate social fabric of the village.
On Sunday afternoons, the schoolteacher climbed the tallest
of the seven mountains to drink from the fountain of
effervescent waters. In a very short time all the villagers
came to consider him as a rare being sent by the grace of God.
They felt blessed by his presence and went out of their way to
stumble upon him just to have the chance to look into the
depths of the sky hidden in his eyes. After Sunday Mass the men
openly compared the eyes of the schoolteacher to the Gates of
Paradise as they recalled the sermon of Prefti Vlasi. “The Lord
gave you sight so that you might glimpse into His soul and know
that He is to be found within you and nowhere else.”
For all of Sheshi, God dwelled in the deep blue of the eyes
of the schoolteacher who had come from so far away to reveal to
them that God truly existed. The doors to their homes flung
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 266
open and their lights shone more brightly when he passed by and
filled their rooms with the presence of God. No one ever dared
ask him in exactly which city had he been born; no one
questioned him about his family. The news of his arrival on the
six o’clock train that came from the wheat fields east of the
seven mountains spread like a cloud floating on top of the warm
winds that had begun to arrive from Africa. “He is not like us;
he is just passing by,” murmured the elderly to one another as
they watched the water flow from the fountain in front of their
bench. “His hands are as white as goat’s milk,” added the women
at the basin of the fountain, where the men could not hear a
word. Indeed, for Prefti Vlasi it was no surprise that the
young girls confessed to him that they dreamed nightly of the
young schoolteacher’s caressing them with those milky hands.
When a decision was to be made concerning the distribution of
water for irrigation or to whom to sell the produce of grapes
and olives, the peasants only trusted the schoolteacher. “He
was sent here to look after us and to make certain that we are
not cheated simply because we were never taught to read. He
does not need a sack of stones, like our fathers did, to
count,” said the one who stood in front of the group. “I have
been told by my grandson that the schoolteacher counts in his
mind and not on his fingers,” said another. “It is God’s
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 267
doing,” added the one who had spoken first, “for no one can see
how he counts.”
It wasn’t long before the schoolteacher was receiving all
sorts of marriage proposals from every young girl in the
village. His answer, always carefully crafted to avoid
offending anyone, was ever the same: “My heart is not ready to
open up yet; it has its own rules that no one can decipher.”
There was no woman in the village who did not like that reply.
In fact, it was a further indication that the schoolteacher
really was a rare being. Years would go by before he would
choose a woman to care for. By that time, most of the girls had
become mothers themselves.
The one who became his wife was a young girl whose age no
one could tell and who had come to claim him as her husband
from a nameless village. The schoolteacher’s future wife
arrived in Sheshi along the road that led to the cemetery…a
dirt road which had no beginning but definitely had a clear
end. The road was as wide as the iron gate in front of the old
part of the cemetery. The young girl’s arrival occurred at a
time in which many of the young men who had been sent to war to
kill an enemy whom they had never seen were returning to the
village in rags and terribly diseased. They had aged so much
that even their mothers had difficulties recognizing them. “War
is like a mask that sticks to your skin and changes you
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 268
forever,” my grandfather used to say. He knew, for he had
fought in many far away places and had seen soldiers who simply
could not stop killing for fear of falling into boredom.
The schoolteacher met the young girl who had been searching
for him at the crossroads below the train station. The village
was covered with a thick fog that during the night had made its
way up from the deep gorge where the waters of the winding
brook descended into the ancient cave of the serpent. For the
schoolteacher it was the hour of his customary morning walk
through the olive groves to check on the disease that afflicted
the centennial trees from within. At the stone next to the
spring of the fizzing waters he caught sight of the young girl
dressed in white who was destined to become his lifelong
companion, outliving every other woman in the village and
silencing forever all the other hearts that beat for him. It
was the moment he never tired of recounting years later to
those who asked him where he had gone to meet the one who had
brought back to him that past that had been erased from the
well of his memories. “I seemed to recognize her from a moment
in time I could not hold down, but I knew at that moment that
she was part of me.” The young girl stood up as the
schoolteacher approached the spring and gave him the smile that
his heart had been waiting to feel. They said very little to
one another. She simply followed a few steps behind him.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 269
Supported by the cane he himself had carved from an olive
tree branch, the schoolteacher took the road through the grove
that led to the oldest part of Sheshi. He wanted to get back
before the cool breeze of the late afternoon that brought
everyone out of their homes. “We reached the first homes of the
village in the late evening,” he recalled. “The sky had so many
stars and the air was so completely still.” Even the elders in
the main square would remember for years to come the evening
when the sky seemed to weave a blanket of silence over the
entire village. The only noise that the schoolteacher was able
to recall years later was the squeaking of his shoes which had
suddenly grown too small for him.
From that night on, the whole village stopped paying
attention to the schoolteacher. One late autumn afternoon,
after an emotional discussion of the “Brothers Karamazov,” the
schoolteacher let his feelings flow like a gush of water.
“At
first,” he said, “I was too involved in putting things in order
at the house with the new guest to notice the changes that had
been brewing in people’s minds.
But the first days of winter
that followed that turbulent fall made me aware of the aura of
loneliness that surrounded us. From the window, I saw a small
sparrow freeze to death. My companion, whose name, at first, I
could barely make out, spent most of the day tending to the
fire. She had not yet ventured out of the house. She swept the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 270
floor and did the washing at night. As for myself, I never did
have a chance to explain to Prefti Vlasi that we were not
living in sin.”
On the first Sunday of winter, Prefti Vlasi did announce to
the parishioners that he was taking over the teaching in the
village. That Sunday also marked the first of the thirty-three
sermons that the Prefti delivered before the tragedy struck
that enveloped the oldest section of Sheshi in a mantle of
darkness that was to last forever.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 271
Chapter Seven
The worst began around the end of February. Rubina awakened,
having spent the night on the wooden bench near the fireplace
with a slight fever that reddened her cheeks. She was then the
oldest woman in the village. Her breath still smelled of the
pomegranate that only grew on the eastern coast across the
narrow corridor of turbulent seas. The icicles on the red roof
tiles glittered as brightly as the canopy of stars when Rubina
spoke to me for the first and last time. She stood at the
fountain in the main square, unable to remember the road home.
I led her to the first homes of Sheshi carved inside the
mountain. In her face I recognized the whole of Sheshi. Rubina
died that same night. She washed and anointed herself with oil,
put on the only dress she had kept inside an old oak chest, and
climbed onto the tall bed. When they found her, the dress she
wore was full of swallows about to spread their wide, dark
wings. Those who remembered her from years past buried her in
the lonely pine grove they still call “the whispering pines.”
Two weeks later, in the midst of the heat wave, we departed for
the city of the playing waves.
I have been standing in front of three college officials who
are to admit me into the college program. The wait has been
long, and the blue-eyed school teacher in Sheshi has been my
companion. There were four of us in the brown-paneled room. An
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 272
oval table separated me from the officials of the review board.
I tried to study their expressions with the hope of
anticipating a certain conclusion, but it was like walking
through the streets of Sheshi on a night of thick fog in the
month of November. Their posture and their inscrutable faces
were a copy of the attitude of the immigration officers in the
office of the consulate in the city of the singing waves. Two
of the college officials did exhibit a vacuous sense of pride,
which they made no effort to hide, but the third attempted to
display a distant smile that carried within it a vague sign of
encouragement. I could see it written in his eyes. The color of
those eyes was unlike that of the school teacher’s eyes in
Sheshi.
I knew then that I could not let my first teacher down. It
seemed as if the time which had passed between the two
different worlds had stood as still as the front gates of the
village cemetery where the cone-shaped pine trees weaved
wreaths of silence in eternity. There the unheard sounds of the
tombstones plant new seeds onto the mirrors of the night.
“Everything you see,” advised the school teacher in Sheshi,
“has a hidden side. You must find the way to see it and to
sense the energy that moves it.”
By that time, his visions, once clear, had become as dark as
a stormy sky, but he must have felt a bottomless urge to warn
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 273
us. Little did he know that he was lifting the veil from our
dreams and shattering the world of fantasy much as the swallow
that pecked against the sky while chasing the flying ants which
the warm spring air often brought to the village.
At the college, I was asked to wait outside. I sat next to
two other students who, waiting to be interviewed, were
conversing in their own language. Their faces were similar to
those on the posters which hung in full view on the front wall
of the classroom in Sheshi. One of the figures on the poster
sported a thick moustache like the one grandfather had; he
trimmed it before he went down to the main square to take his
seat among those who shared his views on politics. The other,
who stood behind in the poster, had curly hair and made thick
glasses which made his eyes look like two sunken wells. Only
years later did I learn who they were.
The student stood when his Slavic name was called. Still I
had not been given an answer. I began to feel uneasy, unable to
cling to the vanishing smile of the third official. Through the
Gothic window I could see that night was falling. In order to
return home I would have to walk through an area that most
students avoided. Finally, my name was called.
“I can see from your application that you want to pursue a
career in the Humanities,” said the one with the distant smile.
“Yes, I do,” I answered in an assured tone, hoping to relay my
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 274
unwavering commitment to the field of study. At that time the
college was home to dozens of refugees like myself who were
full of questions but with very little hope of ever finding
complete answers. I realized that afternoon how difficult it
was going to be to enter the rigid world of the three people
who had interviewed me.
I was asked to wait outside the conference room. I felt a
strong urge to run away from the place. An hour later the door
to the conference room opened. One of the three interviewers
instructed me to choose the fall courses with the help of an
advisor. “You will receive a formal letter of acceptance within
the week, and in it you will find the name of your advisor,” he
said without even blinking once. I bowed with respect and left
the Gothic building. Night had already fallen, and the wind was
buffeting the leaves about on the ground as it despoiled the
trees of the few others which yet struggled to cling to the
branches.
The few lampposts that lined the street were quickly losing
their brightness as a thick fog descended upon the tenements.
The entrances to those buildings exhaled a haze of loneliness
as the street signs began to float in mid-air. The wet wind
kept everyone at home, but for a few homeless people who moved
slowly along the iron rail fences with no clear destination in
mind. On the main avenue, others walked toward the iron bridge
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 275
which connected the two boroughs of the city; they were intent
upon reconstructing their cardboard homes for the night beneath
the steel beams. The staircases to the basements of the
tenement houses reeked of urine and of the mold which had clung
to them for decades.
I hastened my pace, hoping to make it across the drawbridge
before it closed to surface traffic and opened for commercial
boats. As I hurried, I thought of mother, her face pressed to
the windowpane, awaiting the return of all her children. She
never retired to her own room until she had counted all of us
with the green rays of her eyes.
The clock with the golden arrows on the commercial building
at the other end of the drawbridge pointed to ten o’clock. That
bank building outshone all the others in the vicinity and even
pierced through the dense mantle of fog. The marble columns
that supported its portico spoke of an age long forgotten by
the few who had ever known that it existed. No one, perhaps,
could see the long tentacles that crept into the steel safety
boxes packed with dreams far and wide of the illuminated
building. It was, indeed, the only monument visible from both
sides of the East River whose waters flowed to the beat of the
drums and the hoarse notes of the saxophones that emanated from
the inner recesses of the tenements. On Friday nights, the
workers of the city gathered in those places to plant their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 276
dreams. They came from miles away to be with the people they
recognized and to have conversations that mimicked the rhythm
of the musical instruments they knew so well.
The sounds that I heard as I walked along the avenue after
class were like the sounds of the long knives the men in Sheshi
used to slaughter the pig in celebration of the Christmas
season. Each beat opened centuries-old wounds as it told the
story of someone who would never have a chance to relate it to
any other or to put it down in writing. The sounds were unlike
any others with which I was familiar. Within those notes were
the sorrowful faces of men and women, and it was not easy to
tell who was laughing or who was crying with each beat. Along
the avenue, there were dozens of underground places where any
sort of blasé thing took place. From the doors left ajar for a
breath of fresh air could be seen long tunnels illuminated by
green and red lights floating on grayish-black smoke. The music
cried with the tears of long ago, and the undecipherable verses
settled upon the faces of those people who occasionally
emerged. The anger that hovered about these places was soon
suffocated by the strong odor of alcohol and the thick veil of
smoke. Within, tall, thin women swirled with the sound of
music, though barely anyone paid any attention to them. The
stage set in the far corner seemed to float on streaks of red
and green lights. Long lines of silent eyes fixed their gaze on
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 277
the half-filled glasses in front of them. Some patrons begged
for a refill without uttering a word. Dollar bills moved on the
counter like so many insects. The thin-waisted dancers moved
like silhouettes carving through invisible walls of silences
packed together by bands of heavy smoke. The contortions of
their bodies were those of snakes looking to hide within the
overgrowth of the meandering old river still smothering the
unheard cries of the night. A wilted rose pinned to the bodice
of each dress contrasted poignantly with their bony bodies,
chiseled with patience from the branch of a redwood tree, one
like those that grow in the deepest gorge of the seven
mountains. The singing of the blues that spoke of bad times and
broken homes turned everyone’s attention to the stage. Eyes
melted underneath the black eyelashes. I thought of Serafina
and her singing and dancing outside her home on the road to the
train station of Sheshi. She sang of the sunset that took her
husband away, never to return from the wide steppes of Eastern
Europe. Her voice was so sweet that all the women behind the
closed doors of Sheshi thought that underneath every pain there
was sweetness. She sang until the burning sun set behind the
seven mountains. It was the moment in which the endless line of
young men dressed in their best suits and floating in perfumes
waited to see Serafina turn into a slender spotted leopard.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 278
This was the talk of the village café, night after night. I
would not have believed it, had I not seen it myself. There
were three of us, and, for the first time, we had been allowed
to sit with the elders in the café. The next day we decided to
hide behind the prickly bushes that every other year brought
the biggest blackberries in the county. I was the eldest of the
three. The other two came from well-to-do families, so our
friendship was kept a secret. The caste system that had ruled
life in Sheshi for as long as everyone could remember allowed
no possibility of questioning it. The wait seemed an eternity,
but, as soon as the few clouds which had covered from view the
full moon of the early evening vanished, the door to Serafina’s
stone house opened, throwing into the air lashes of fire and
gray smoke. For the first time we saw the familiar legend of
the serpent in the sacred cave reach into the magical depths of
the night and sensed the awakening of strange, unfamiliar pains
that reached deep into the unmentioned depths of secular
energy. It was the journey into the heart of that strange
desire that had made us tremble when least expected.
The tall, bony figure had stopped dancing and now directed a
piercing glance at a stranger who stood motionless at the
entrance of the bar. The Gothic structure of City College was
no longer visible. I moved towards the bridge, hoping to cross
it before it elevated its steel beams to allow the barges
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 279
through. As the years were swept away by the cold, autumn
winds, so were the faces of the people lined along the avenue
from the college to the bridge. Yet, there was one face that
refused to succumb to the beatings of time. She was the
guardian of the dark, strange world I yearned to enter, a world
whose sounds and movements spoke to me of the beatings of a
life so pristine and earthly and yet fleeting as the clouds
that danced around the moon during those nights.
The old woman carried a plastic bag filled with what appeared
to be her own clothes. She seemed to be relying upon a cane, as
one shoulder stood lower than the other. Her hair, rumpled and
unwashed, guarded a face cross-hatched by hundreds of lines
that hid her real self. The distance between the underground
bar and the spot where the woman stood was no distance at all.
Time moved in a straight line, fusing the starting point with
the end point. The waters beneath the bridge were as dark as
the sky. I turned around to glance at the woman whom I had left
behind. She had covered herself with a white plastic sheet that
was no protection from the cold wind channeled by the steel
beams of the bridge. For a moment I thought of the three
academicians who had conducted the interview and wondered if
they had ever crossed the bridge over the dark, silent river.
“Old age is an invisible disease that no one can trace. Go and
find the road that begins from beyond the pine trees of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 280
cemetery. Do not think about us. We shall wait for you inside
the mirror of our ancestors.” This was the elders’ way of
saying good-bye to the young men of Sheshi as they passed the
square through the lined almond trees on their way to the train
station. No one of them looked back, and the elders themselves
on the wooden bench fixed their eyes on the fountain. The
children swirled around their motionless gaze, and the swallows
dived forcibly in and out of the breeze that swayed the cross
on the belfry. “No one in the village has ever gone through the
wall that rings around the wooden bench of the elders,” my
mother asserted as I inquired of their whereabouts in Sheshi.
“The key to open that door will be given to you when you are
ready to enter it and never leave it. Of that road,” she
continued, “you can only see the beginning. The end, they say,
lies beyond the tall cypress trees that in the early days of
autumn hide their tops inside the thick fog of the seven
mountains.”
It must have been about ten o’clock that evening when I saw
the two police cars stop near Saint Mary’s Park on the main
road that crossed Jackson Avenue. The otherwise busy avenue,
lined with sycamore trees empty of their leaves, was totally
deserted. Most of the lights in the park were out; some were
broken, while others lay down, uprooted. Four major paths
crossed each other to form smaller ones that disappeared behind
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 281
the tall bushes. Three officers sprang from the police car
swinging batons. In their midst was a small, shirtless man.
Tied to the fence, he was repeatedly kicked and struck upon the
head. This all happened very quickly. I held my breath until I
saw the police car speed away and melt into the silence of the
night. I approached the unfortunate man only to see
the blood
gushing from his head and forming a pool into which his head
sank ever more deeply.
I took the path that ended on Jackson Avenue and quickly
entered the apartment building. In the apartment, mother was
still awake with the quilt over her knees. I saw no need to
tell my sister what I had witnessed on the avenue. It would
only have heightened her fear of the outside. She was listening
to some songs that spoke softly of the moon and the seas with a
sky filled with stars. I could see her eyes filled with tears
which quickly turned into icy streaks as they attempted to fall
towards her cheeks. Her heart had hardened the day she told her
suitor not to show his face again below her window. “I cannot
waste my time with you when I have my mother to care for,” she
had told him. She did not know that the man leaning against the
lamppost was willing to wait for her for an eternity. And, in
fact, the people on Jackson Avenue saw him pace from one end of
the street to the other even when the neighborhood changed so
much that they no longer recognized one another.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 282
I washed the blood from my hands. The image of the poor man’s
face lying motionless on the steel railing of Saint Mary’s Park
mirrored itself in my palm. For the first time that night I
felt the pain of silence that loomed secretively over the wide
avenue that cut Jackson Avenue in two. My mother’s eyes moved
as if she had seen the head of the man drowning in his own
blood disturbed only by the few drops of rain that were falling
from the tree branches as they trembled in the wind. She
extended her hand as she did when she wished to say something.
I placed my hand over hers and felt the emptiness of the park
and that of the man soaked in blood and rain. I could barely
hear my mother’s disconnected sounds as she drew me closer to
her and whispered softly, “I was mistaken to tell you not to
look back at Sheshi as the train was leaving the station. Turn
your eyes back, for there time stands still.” I felt a
trembling in my hand as I detached it from hers. I promised to
follow her advice and placed the quilt over her hands.
It was a sleepless night. The agonizing face of the man on
the iron fence of Saint Mary’s Park holding onto the last
breath of life as his eyes bulged from their sockets grew more
violently clear as the night gave way to the first streaks of
sunlight. Without giving any explanation, Mother had told
sister to place a glass of water with a slice of bread on the
kitchen table for thirty nights. “It is the only way that poor
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 283
man can find his resting place,” she said to me weeks later. It
was at this time that I became aware how much my sister looked
like my mother. They had become of one mind. Morning after
morning, I found the glass empty and the slice of bread eaten
in three places. The five copper pots which hung over the stove
changed places nightly, and the light brightened and dimmed
with regularity during those thirty days. Yet everything
assumed a strange calm just before dawn, when all in the house
returned to its original place.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth day, my younger brother
was found sleeping on top of the tall bureau between the living
room and the bedroom. “Bring him down, but take care not to
awaken him,” my mother told Sister. “It is the little spirits
who roam around during the night and play tricks on the living
while the souls of the dead search for eternal rest.”
That morning, my younger brother opened his eyes with a fear
that even Mother had never seen there before. “He has been
marked forever by someone transiting to the other side of
darkness,” Mother declared as she tried to hold back her tears.
“They are waiting to beat me up!” he told Father, who was
concerned that an absence from school would bring the
authorities to the house. So it was that I was given the task
of accompanying him to school. The fake stone building stood on
the East side of Saint Mary’s Park. “I have been dreaming of a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 284
dead man drowning in his own blood and unable to scream night
after night,” my brother confided one morning as we approached
the school. The horror with which he awoke that morning stayed
with him for the rest of his life. Doctor after doctor simply
diagnosed it as a chronic pneumonia in one of the lungs which
forced the brain to emit distorted images. “I will be taking
you home after school,” I told him. “The dream of the dead
person is just a fleeting image you must have seen on
television.” But this did nothing to reassure him. For years he
enclosed himself in his room, drawing the face of the dead man
tied to the railing that enclosed Saint Mary’s Park. Yet, his
schoolwork was superb. The rest of his time he devoted to
completing the drawing. “I am almost there. I only need a few
more details to capture the fear hidden deeply in the man’s
eyes,” he announced during the evening meal. By this time,
Father had difficulties grasping what was being said. His eyes
wandered from place to place as if trying to recognize objects.
In no time, all four walls of my younger brother’s room were
covered with the drawings of the dead man of his dreams. “If he
ever opens the closet on the side of the bed, we will never see
him again,” Mother announced one night as she began to mend the
woolen quilt she had brought from Sheshi. It was being slowly
consumed by the moths hidden in the four corners of her wooden
chest. I was never able to actually see even one of these moths
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 285
as I placed the quilt over her knees night after night. I saw
the colors fade with the approaching darkness of the night only
to reappear still faded the next morning. Mother consumed
skeins of yarn trying to bring the quilt back to its original
condition, but what she mended in a week was consumed in just a
few days. The devouring began as soon as she closed her eyes.
It wasn’t long before her eyes barely opened with the first
sunlight of the morning.
Our home became a nest of dreams. Thick walls of silences
were being erected around each family member. The usual
conversations during the evening meals at the dinner table
began to fade away. It wasn’t long before each took refuge in a
world where sensations and undefined desires moved faster than
the dark clouds of a stormy night. The distorted face of the
man tied to the iron fence had entered the apartment to stay.
The house key was turned to the left from the inside door just
before sunset. Many a time the door stayed closed for weeks.
That night, I had thought of moving the dead man’s head to the
East away from the dark clouds enveloping the moon. The thick
blood gushing from his mouth and ears had completely masked his
face.
I went back to the park night after night to see if his soul
had stopped wandering through the loneliness of the deserted
paths of the park. The body had vanished and no trace was left
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 286
of the killing. For a while I even convinced myself that it
must have been all a dream, something perhaps seen or read in a
moment of distraction caused by the ticking of the clock or the
changing hues of sunlight. The blackbirds beating their wings
against the fence of the park and the violent shaking of the
tree branches that lined the avenue were proof that the beating
and the killing had really taken place. These impressions were
not caused by the wind, for nothing else moved.
I sought corroboration for what I had witnessed from the
newspapers and the evening news and even from a few of the
people from the neighborhood, but nothing was mentioned and no
one knew anything. “These things only happen in the spy films
they show every now and then on television,” said the one who
sat on the steps to the apartment building. The darker one who
was leaning against the entrance added sarcastically, “Nothing
happens in this neighborhood.” His stern expression revealed
ingrained pains from the past. I dismissed the temptation to
refer the event to the men in black uniform in the brick
building on the North side of Saint Mary’s Park.
The morning coffee was served in silence in the presence of
Mother and Sister. Father had left for the barber shop much
earlier than usual, hoping, perhaps, to serve the customers he
had not served during the week. It was a cloudy Saturday.
Little did he know that those clients had moved away from the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 287
neighborhood. It was an event that occurred with precise
regularity. One group of people would replace another and
quickly change the character of the place. Without any order
being issued, the houses would be repainted, the flower beds
redesigned, and the windows covered with dark brown curtains.
We sipped the coffee slowly. “Out there things happen in ways
our family cannot comprehend. In my dreams I have been seeing
men in black uniforms digging deeply in underground caves.
Black spiders fill the walls and their bellies grow with the
taste of blood.” Mother had not spoken for months. The lucidity
and directness for which she had been known in Sheshi had come
back to her. I could see a distant smile work at the corners of
my sister’s mouth. Perhaps she felt less burdened by the
responsibilities of caring for everyone in the family, for
Mother’s words were proof that she was still in charge in the
house. “I will not let you fall into the mouth of the spider,”
she said to me. “I know too well what I had to endure to bring
you into this world.” Your sister and your younger brother will
soon be depending on you and your father will have to close the
barber shop sooner than he thinks. The day he opens his eyes to
what is happening around him, he will be forced to let go of
the world he has known ever since his first day as an
apprentice in the village’s barber shop.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 288
What Mother had foretold happened sooner than expected. One
November evening as we were seated at the dinner table, Father
announced that he would no longer go to the barber shop.
“Yesterday,” he said, “I waited all day long for a customer; no
one came.” That night, nothing more was said. The inevitable
had been announced to the surprise of no one. What was not
expected was the conviction with which Father had delivered his
decision.
The winter that followed was longer than usual. Mother and
Father spent day after day sitting close to one another by the
kitchen window, which overlooked the neatly kept vegetable
gardens. The gardens brought smiles and wisps of sadness into
their faces as the produce changed colors with the passing
seasons. Soon after, my parents began to weave their memories
with the light of the changing seasons and the hues of the
clouds. No one else in the house disturbed their stay by the
window except to serve them their afternoon cup of coffee or to
call them to the dinner table.
My younger brother, Darius, whose fear of the dead man on
the iron fence of Saint Mary’s Park had by now taken over his
whole being, double locked the door to his room and took refuge
in the closet with his ancient leather globe. “The world is
much smaller than it appears to be,” he proudly announced one
evening as we sat around the table. Darius had suddenly grown
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 289
into a learned young man with knowledge that went beyond the
written words on the leather globe. Indeed, time had taken hold
of each member of the family and had begun to build high walls
like the ones that grow on top of the clouds on the first days
of winter. On Jackson Avenue, the opposition to the war being
fought on the side of the world grew louder with each passing
day. Tall grass was slowly creeping into every path in Saint
Mary’s Park. The young of the neighborhood no longer played
handball against the cement wall. Their older brothers had come
back in gray uniforms with brass buttons. Behind their forced
smiles lay fears dipped in blood. Death had come to nest on
Jackson Avenue.
In the sky, flocks of black birds swirled violently over the
chimneys of the tenement buildings. It was then that Mother
took hold of my hand with all the strength she could muster and
let go a stream of disconnected sounds. “This war will open a
wound that will never close, and the first to be sent to the
fields of the dead flowers will be those who look like us. Many
will never scale the heights of the mountains. The neighborhood
will never be the same. Your brother will be with them. When he
returns, he will not recognize the house.”
The heavy rains that brought fall to an end had arrived much
earlier. For weeks the streets adjoining Jackson Avenue
remained impassable. Sheets of rain had turned the avenue
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 290
itself into a river, and heavy debris from collapsed homes and
uprooted trees blocked the entrances to the tenement buildings.
The elderly could no longer take the usual afternoon stroll
that generally affirmed that they were still part of the
community and that time had not played any tricks on them. It
rained for three full weeks, and it took the sun another week
to dispel the dark clouds that had loomed over the
neighborhood. On the second morning of the fifth week, the
postman delivered a letter with three stamps filled with stars
on a clear blue backdrop. I placed the letter on the kitchen
table and noticed that it did not carry the name of the sender.
After the letter occupied the space on the table for months it
became discolored.
The library on the other side of the train tracks that
divided the main avenue had become my daily refuge. In the
basement of the library, among the stacks of newspapers, I
searched for any news I could find about the death of the man
tied to the iron railing of Saint Mary’s Park. I received
special permission from the librarian to go through the
newspapers. Through his thick spectacles, he followed every
move I made. We were the only two people to break the mantle of
silence that hovered over the large reading room filled with
rectangular oak tables. Many a time I was tempted to tell him
what I had witnessed that October day at exactly ten o’clock at
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 291
night. (I knew for certain that it was ten o’clock because I
had counted each toll of the bell.) But I restrained myself
because of the long streaks of fear I had noticed in the
librarian’s eyes. These were dark filaments in the shape of
whips beating upon naked bodies running toward an open space
which became ever more restricted by the buffeting winds as
they approached it. The lacerated bodies were beaten repeatedly
until they moved no more.
Upon his right arm the librarian bore a serial number in
blue. It was then that I understood the source of the fear
still floating through the whites of his eyes.
It was a Friday evening. The librarian and I were the only
ones left in the reading room. The old woman who usually sat
motionless in the corner of the room guarding her two plastic
bags filled with newspapers had left earlier. Now the librarian
appeared dazed, his mind wandering into the depths of his
memories. I could see in his face the vivid picture of a person
screaming for air as he faded into the crevices of darkness. I
could sense his keen sorrow at having failed to find someone
who could hear him and share the pain of his remembered
existence. Dragging his left foot, the librarian approached the
table. “I must close for the day. You may come back tomorrow to
continue with your research.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 292
“I saw someone beaten to death awhile ago near Saint Mary’s
Park. No one seems to know anything about it. I was hoping to
find some news by going through the newspapers,” I said.
“Don’t waste your time,” he admonished. “Such news is not
printed.” The rain that had been falling for the past hour came
crashing against the window panes of the reading room. Darkness
had descended, blurring the entire chamber. The librarian
locked the doors and shut off the lights.
Outside, the steady rains had already flooded the street. The
treetops brushed the sky without reaching the clouds. From a
distance I saw the librarian lock the main entrance to the
library and then turn to glance at the building with its white
columns and rectangular colonial-style windows. The intensity
of the rain forced him to hesitate from crossing the street.
Soon the quickly rising water compelled him to return to the
entrance of the library. With his hands pushed deeply into the
pockets of his raincoat, he watched the current depositing all
manner of debris along the sidewalk. The sheets of rain that
followed the intermittent thunder suffocated the inner cries of
the tiny figure huddled against the door. He looked like an
untold story kept secret by the shadows of those people who
never find a way to lean against something solid and whose
lives come and go like the fading colors of the leaves during
the last days of autumn.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 293
By now the swift current had reached the first of the library
stairs. It seemed to want to rain forever. I moved to the
higher ground of the main avenue and waited for the bus to take
me home. The librarian had gone inside to wait for the rain to
end. Far away along the horizon there appeared an opening of
light and dark blues amidst mountains of black clouds. The
fallen leaves sailed like thousands of ships aided by the
reflected lights of the lampposts.
A week had passed, but the librarian had not been seen at his
desk. I did not dare to suppose the reason for his absence.
During the second week, his place was taken by a young woman in
her thirties. Her dark hair and thick dark glasses obscured
every other feature. She spent every minute of the day dusting
and reordering the library cards. The few people who used the
reading room were of no concern to her. Soon after she began
dusting and wiping the colonies of mold that had invaded the
bookshelves. This ritual went on for months. The dark clouds
had already begun to fuse with each other into thicker and
darker clouds.
It was the first day of December. To be exact, it was also
the first Monday of the week. The newspaper I was reading
verified the date. I heard the door to the library open. The
old librarian appeared. He wore a heavy black coat and a hat
that covered his ears. He walked straight towards the table
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 294
where I sat with the newspaper open. He pulled up a chair
quietly, sat down and looked at me with intense anxiety. “I was
unable to come to work because a persistent fever took
possession of me. It lasted for weeks, which soon seemed longer
than all the years I could count. Last night they came to tell
me that my position in the library was terminated. I barely had
the strength to even open the door to my room. ‘Don’t ask any
questions,’ they said. ‘The decision is final. It came from
high above and there are no procedures for appeal.’ They left
without even closing the door. I spent the night trying to
search my memory for where I had seen them before, but I could
trace neither of the two. Maybe you can help me identify them
if they ever step into the library.”
So began our long mutual wait for the two men to return. Our
eyes were fixed upon the entrance to the library. To avoid
being detected by the new librarian we learned how to
communicate with the movements of our fingers and eyes. I
searched through every available magazine, scrutinizing each
photograph in them with the hope of tying those two men to the
ones who had beaten the hapless victim in Saint Mary’s Park.
Meanwhile, the elderly librarian dissected the news printed in
the community papers to find a reference to his discharge from
his post. It did not take long for the pile of magazines and
newspapers to attract such suspicious glances from the female
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 295
librarian that we were cowed into keeping our fingers still and
our eyes down.
At home, Mother had taken a turn for the worse. The clarity
of her eyes, which had been able to pierce through the fear
that besieged me, was no longer. In its place was dark gray
cloudiness.
Now the entrances to Saint Mary’s Park were patrolled by
dozens of police wearing dark blue uniforms and bearing
automatic rifles. Shrouded by the dense silence that had
invaded our apartment from the alley of the tenement house, I
examined inch by inch the spot where the killing had taken
place that October night. Had there been someone else that
night who might have heard the suffocating voice of the dying
man from one of the windows of the building that faced the
railing? I asked myself that question over and over again as
the sunlight faded in the sky and I gave way to even greater
fears rather than gathering the courage to enter that building.
“People only see what they want to see,” cautioned the old
librarian when I told him of my desire to search for a witness
to the killing. But late that afternoon the nauseating image of
the man drowning in his own blood compelled me to approach the
building facing the railing. It was the tallest structure in
the area, its brick face darkened by the exhaust from the
automobiles that rushed by. Iron ladders sprung half way from
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 296
each window. An old wooden door, weather beaten by the rainy
days of fall and the piles of snow of winter, stood ajar.
Inside, an old wallpaper designed with barely discernible
hunting scenes covered the hallway. The floors were littered
with discarded paper and soda cans. Not one of the names on the
list of tenement dwellers was legible, so I was not surprised
that no one answered when I rang the first three bells of the
top section. I went through the entire panel with the same
result. The cold, distant atmosphere had choked forever the
last of the memories that might have inhabited the premises.
Outside the wind blustered mercilessly, causing the few
remaining leaves to cower against the sidewalks. The higher
branches of the trees,
totally barren, were already shrouded
by the cold evening mist that
descended from the gray clouds
which had hovered above the city for weeks. At a lone window of
the dark building two elderly faces hid between the drapes and
the shutters. They moved like the colors half-visible between
the cracks in the menacing clouds.
I returned home facing the heavy evening traffic on the
avenue. Vaguely audible steps followed me to the corner of
Jackson Avenue. I walked close to the row of houses with their
rusted front railings, a piercing feeling of defeat threatening
to invade my whole self. At home alone with Mother, Sister
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 297
assailed me with a complaint as I locked the door behind me and
set the security chain. “We rarely see you anymore.”
“I am doing some research in the library,” I replied. Mother
sat quietly with her eyes closed next to the kitchen window. I
approached and touched her left hand softly. She always kept it
on top of the woolen blanket, ready to communicate with Sister.
The fingers, now all bent and swollen at the joints, trembled
incessantly. Yet Mother’s eyes still revealed the deep
understanding she had of the surroundings. Her intense look
penetrated much beyond the surface of objects, reaching the
depths where sound and color fused with deep feeling caused
them to oscillate furiously. This often happened at the dinner
table, where dishes abruptly changed places. “Things have a
life of their own,” explained my mother. “They are moved by a
force invisible to us but clear as the sky after a summer storm
to those who came before us.”
Her fingers trembling ever more violently, she added, “Your
search will not lead you anywhere.” I had a feeling that she
had been reading me like an open book ever since I began to
follow the movement of her own eyes. She fell into a deep
stupor and pointed her two middle fingers toward my sister.
“She is saying that one of these days you won’t be able to find
your way home because you will confuse bats for swallows in the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 298
infested alleys of the neighborhood. I will make you an amulet
with the bone powder of our dead from Sheshi,” she added.
Sister and Mother spoke to one another without uttering a
sound. As they moved in and out of their inner space, I could
only see the plants blooming with intense yellow flowers that
turned into butterflies that searched for the sun’s rays
meandering through the kitchen ceiling. The china globe of the
old electric light had to be emptied every week. Sister
carefully placed each butterfly upon a long circular string
until she had counted ninety-nine of them, whereupon she
positioned them inside blue envelopes. “The blue will help them
live longer,” she said.
Years later, as I removed the last pieces of furniture from
the apartment to move to a single room, I heard the workers who
were removing the living room wallpaper exclaim. They had come
across thousands of envelopes filled with well-preserved yellow
butterflies whose wings displayed a strange linguistic code.
Resembling ancient texts, the blue windows with endless words
appearing and disappearing in them defied the efforts of the
most sophisticated museum officials who sought to decode them
with high-powered microscopic lenses. These linguists never
realized that the butterfly wings were ingrained with the many
conversations between Mother and Sister.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 299
Night had fallen and a heavy, sultry air had settled over
Jackson Avenue. Mother had not stopped moving her two fingers.
At times, she even attempted to move her head toward the door
to the apartment corridor. Until now, though her joints had
become crooked with pain, her face had preserved its youthful
expression, her eyes, their typical intensity. She kept a
photograph of her mother as a child inside a leather amulet.
They had looked like twins in a timeless circle, but over time,
Mother’s features had begun to retreat.
On a bitterly cold autumn night, the amulet fell to the floor
and lay there as dust clinging to the linoleum, as sap upon the
bark of a tree. Red drops emerged from the dusty brown mound,
and, with a piercing howl, opened a crevice in the floor. The
sound was the same as that which descended from the seven
mountains on top of Sheshi and forced the inhabitants to nail
the windows shut with iron claws. Sister, standing next to the
window that overlooked the street, had just imagined seeing
Father’s bent figure returning from the barber shop when she
heard the lacerating cry. “Go and look for Father!” she urged.
“Something must have happened to him.”
I rushed down the wooden stairway. The streetlights had just
come on and the wind howled and banged the door to the building
back against the wall. Jackson Avenue seemed to mirror itself
in the pale white color of the sky. The street was completely
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 300
empty. The lights on the front entrances of the private houses
trembled with the sheets of cold slashing against them. The
main avenue was also deserted of automobiles and pedestrians,
and the elevated train on Third Avenue floated silently over
the darker lines of the horizon.
I quickened my pace, convinced by now that something indeed
had occurred at the barber shop. “He has been beaten and robbed
of the few dollars he managed to earn.” I felt as helpless as
those faces hiding behind the curtains of the building opposite
the pool of blood along the iron railing of Saint Mary’s Park.
“We have to go back home before your mother leaves us. She
made me promise to bury her between her mother and father.”
Those were the words Father had said the previous night as he
announced that the time had come to close the shop for good.
Most of the stores selling affordable clothing had also been
shutting their doors for months, leaving the sidewalks along
Third Avenue littered with refuse and empty cartons.
As I rushed toward the shop, I could see the sign with its
serpentine colors revolving slowly but with determination.
Father was sitting in the last chair against the wall. The
revolving leather chairs in front of the rectangular mirror had
all been slashed. Slumped there motionless, Father was slow to
recognize me. “We should go home now,” he said in a tremulous
voice. I lifted him from the chair and helped him to put on his
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 301
coat. He wiped away the foam that had been spread over the
mirror, turned off the lights and locked the door without
looking back. The way home was filled with pained silence.
Father was closed to me, as if he wanted to hang onto something
stronger than he.
This was the third time that they had entered the barber
shop and threatened to move the knife placed against his
throat. “They were young, not yet men. I could see it in their
eyes,” he kept repeating as we quickened the pace toward home
with the wind howling from branch to branch along the main
avenue. The neighborhood, where the barber shop had been for
generations, had changed without my father’s awareness until
those days when he waited for hours for a client to come in. he
had been very patient, never losing the hope of building a big
clientele and making his barber shop the realm he had dreamt of
owning ever since that first morning when his own father had
awakened him.
“Wash you face and comb your hair to the side. I am taking
you to Master Basili to learn his trade,” your grandfather said
to me. “I walked close to him, like you are doing now, going
down the dirt road that led to the main square of Sheshi,
careful not to soil my polished shoes and the white shirt your
grandmother had ironed the night before. I can still feel the
heavy starch in the collar and cuffs. She had spent the night
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 302
scrubbing the buttons with vinegar. I had just turned eight
years of age three days before. I remember the date very well,
for, deep down where I used to hide so many things I could not
say, I was wishing that my mother had baked just a few of those
sweet Christmas cookies with the white sugar on top. But the
day went by just like any other. Mother sat next to the balcony
mending the same work clothes that came in rectangular boxes
from a faraway aunt. And my father sold shoes to the people who
lived on the high slopes of the seven mountains. Owning a pair
of shoes in those days was like having a house or a beast of
burden now. He always warned people to protect the shoes from
the rain and the mud. The pair of shoes you wore when you left
Sheshi with you mother and younger brother was the very last
pair your grandfather ever made.”
As I walked beside Father, I noticed how diminutive he had
become. Gone was the pose of certainty and pride that he had
struck in the photograph he kept carefully sealed in an old
cigar box inscribed in dull yellow letters with the name “La
Habana.” When I had asked my father what the name meant and
where the box had come from, he told me that it had been
brought to Sheshi by a sailor who died of homesickness before
he could find his way back to the sea. The sailor was an uncle
of his who had gone around the world in search of a place to
make his home. He had stayed away from Sheshi for many years,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 303
but when he returned without having found such a place, he
realized that the parcel of land he had been looking for stood
at the end of the village. From there he could look around one
hundred and eighty degrees and see as far as his blurred vision
would allow without stepping out of the circle of round stones.
The uncle had given my father the cigar box as he, in full
sailor’s uniform, was being taken to a home in the city beyond
the seven mountains where no home had fewer than a hundred
steps. It was said in Sheshi that the steps in that city
multiplied as one ascended them and finally came to rest in the
blue stone church that, on a clear day, disappeared into the
depths of the sky.
By now it was drizzling with determination. We had a while to
go before reaching home. I was told not to mention anything of
the event; little did my father know that Mother had seen
everything before it happened. In her moment of lucidity she
was able to recall the minutest details of circumstances that
would lead to changes in what we were accustomed to seeing.
“Things have a soul of their own. They float into spaces to
which we have no access,” she reminded herself as she tried to
control the movement of her two middle fingers. It was only
lately that I had begun to realize that Mother’s inward eye
allowed things to be seen from within, while the rest of us
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 304
only saw the fleeting moments of those objects as they awakened
a memory in ourselves.
“Your mother,” continued my father in a sullen voice as we
walked as close to the tenement buildings as we could, “is no
longer with us. At times I feel that she doesn’t recognize me;
she must be very unhappy to be here. I should never have
allowed her to leave Sheshi. I guess she misses our home and
the afternoon visits to the cemetery to converse with her
parents. Had I known that she would end this way, I would have
fed you wild chicory of the sort that grows down in the village
ravine instead of leaving you alone for so many years.”
Trying to lessen the guilt that was weighing so heavily upon
his conscience I told my father that it was not his fault, that
he should blame, instead, the long war that had ravaged the
countryside and had brought those strange people to Sheshi who
killed all the swallows in the square with their copper bullets
and crooked knives just for the fun of it. I had no way of
knowing if he understood me, for I received no reply. The wind
had turned icy and Father was having difficulty breathing. We
slowed our pace and rested at the entrance of a brick building
from which I could detect the light in our apartment window.
There was a streak of black to one side of the glass; it must
have been the shadow of my sister who was waiting for our
arrival. Of course we did not know then that it would be her
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 305
fate to wait a lifetime for some one of us to come home. “Get
used to waiting,” Mother advised her. “It is going to be your
lot, and no one can change it.” Sister was to wait all her
life, even putting off her own death, for the invisible suitor
who was to take her to the other side of Saint Mary’s Park that
she could scarcely make out from her bedroom window.
“We can go now,” said Father. “I think I can breathe better.
Besides, I can see your sister waiting for us from her window,
even though my eyes are beginning to betray me.” The air had
thickened, weighing upon my shoulders as if to prevent me from
seeing my father safely home. A sense of sadness nestled deep
within me as the drizzle changed into cold drops of steady
rain.
Over dinner, the announcement was made. “I shall no longer
work at the barber shop.” Father did not go into the specifics
he had discussed with me. My mother’s fingers stopped twitching
and, for just a moment, they extended naturally over the woolen
blanket covering her knees. Her face seemed to have found the
serenity she had been longing for as she sought to meet my
sister’s eyes. The evening came to an end as naturally as the
old season, with the new one already displaying its own
changes.
In no time I became the focus of attention and of reliability
at home. Father had taken his place next to Mother by the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 306
window overlooking the carefully-kept vegetable garden. On the
sill they had placed a few pots seeded with basil and oregano.
Around the plants they wove years of memories together,
avoiding, perhaps, the completion of the circle that was
creeping up the window through the vines from down below.
The objects that filled the apartment seemed to have found
their natural place, and so had my sister, who began weaving
the most intricate designs in the white linen she had brought
from Sheshi. It was a gift from our great-grandmother. In the
late hours of the afternoon, when the sun had begun its descent
behind the tallest hill of Saint Mary’s Park, Sister glanced
into the street from her bedroom window. “I dreamt last night
that he had come back,” she related to Mother each morning as
she prepared the usual cup of black coffee. “I asked some of
the neighbors if they had seen him, as they had before, leaning
with one leg against the lamppost, his eyes fixed on the front
window of the house. Not one of them could recall such a
sight.”
“Things change too fast for us,” one of the neighbors
ventured to say. “We can’t keep up with them, for we have no
space left in our memories.”
The sign over the door of the old Jewish couple’s store was
washed out and people no longer sat on the steps of the
tenement homes as they once had upon returning from work. Tall,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 307
almost windowless buildings had taken the place of the fourstory homes with their iron ladders zigzagging from one window
to another. The black lampposts had been replaced with taller
aluminum lights that bent down from the sky like lone wires.
The automobiles with thick dark windows swept down the avenue
like the tail end of comets. People moved in a controlled
fashion, as if directed by an invisible hand from behind walls
of fog nourished by the approaching winter.
Mother and Father rarely moved from their place overlooking
the garden, and my sister learned to ignore the passage of time
as she embroidered sheet after sheet without duplicating a
single one of her intricate, geometric designs. “I hope I will
have enough sheets before I hear the bell ringing from
downstairs.” She never lost the hope of opening the door for
him. But in the neighborhood, she was the only one who still
kept seeing him leaning against the lamppost as his face slowly
withered.
One morning, toward the hour when the sun shone most
brightly, revealing briefly the myriad cracks that had appeared
on the walls and the hundreds of spider webs in the many
corners, my sister discovered mountains of moths which had been
multiplying inside the sheets of fine linen. “Now I know for
certain that I will have to wait much longer for the bell to
ring. Mending this damage is going to take me many seasons.” In
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 308
a way she thought that it was Mother who had sent the moths
into the cedar wardrobe so as to keep her busy with her chores.
At this time the letters we had received regularly from
Sheshi had ceased to arrive. In his brief moments of lucidity,
Father would ask Sister to go down to the mailbox to check for
the mail. “The mailman hasn’t come by yet,” she would tell him,
hoping to extend his interval of clarity so that she could ask
him what to do with the barber shop that had been closed for
months. “Wait until your older brother decides to join us from
the city beyond the white mountains,” he asserted with his
timeless mind, trying to convince himself that all his efforts
had not been in vain. “He will have everything ready upon
arrival and will be able to sustain himself and his family. It
was this answer that made us aware that Father had returned to
the time of his youth and was talking in the same way that his
own father had spoken to him when he had decided to close his
cobbler shop in Sheshi.
Grandfather had written his son a long, detailed letter from
the land of the twin eagles, where he had been sent with his
shiny black uniform. In the missive, he had advised my father
how urgent it was to return to the village and assume ownership
of the shop. “The holidays are approaching,” he wrote, “and the
young men of Sheshi are getting ready to look their best.” My
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 309
father had kept that letter among his most valuable documents
for more than fifty years.
I returned to the library with the hope of seeing the old man
with the numbers on his right arm. I waited for days while I
resumed reading the newspapers from front to back. One front
page bore the picture of soldiers wearing khaki uniforms and
long beards. Others spoke of lost struggles against an
invisible enemy that fought at night, causing droughts and
famine wherever it appeared. From the heartland where the wheat
fields grew as tall as poplar trees, people were taking up arms
against foreign invaders looking for a better life. Two images
on the front page of another newspaper caught my attention
because they presented such a stark contrast. On the left of
the first page a black woman sat cross-legged; she was holding
a child whose ribs protruded from his body like so many dead
twigs. An empty wooden bowl stood like an empty water hole
between the woman and the child. To the right was the image of
a pale, slim woman draped in garlands of gold and silver; she
stood next to a brand-new washing machine. The caption read,
“Now a woman can protect her soft skin from the damaging effect
of detergents.”
“Have you seen the old man who sat across from me at this
table” I asked the new librarian with the long, curly black
hair as she collected the rest of the newspapers. “I do not pay
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 310
attention to who comes and goes from the library. Hundreds of
people use these facilities every day. Besides, I have been
busy dusting and rearranging the books on the shelves,” she
retorted firmly. In truth, the old librarian and I had been the
only ones present in the library for months.
I left the library quietly and walked down Chamber Street for
just a few blocks to inquire about the old man at the spot
where he stopped daily for a quick cup of coffee. “He was here
last Friday just when we were about to close. He left this
envelope for you. He knew you were going to come here to ask
for him,” said the girl as she continued to clean and reset the
tables. I opened the envelope as I stepped out of the coffee
shop. “No one was killed on the night of November fourteenth at
the front railing of Saint Mary’s Park. There was no news of
the event in any of the newspapers printed three days before or
three days after that date.”
Still I waited for the old librarian to come back and to take
his seat across from me at the reading table in the library.
Autumn passed and the first uncertain snowflakes playing in the
wind arrived. I passed by the librarian’s apartment, hoping to
see a light flickering against the window pane, but the shade
was pulled down completely. Yet I could not shake the feeling
that someone was watching me from the place.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 311
I entered the new grocery store, where the elderly Jewish
couple had worked, and greeted the owners in their own
language. They had come from an island in the Caribbean where
the palm trees swayed with the breeze day after day. Bright
colors and exotic fruits replaced the indefinable sense of loss
that I had always felt as I faced the old Jewish couple.
I left through the back door and paused in every entrance
along the street to make certain that no one was following me.
I remembered how the old librarian had told me, almost in spite
of himself, that he had been hiding from certain pursuers since
the morning he found the tall gates of the concentration camp
wide open and sheets of silences all around the compound. “The
halls of pain were deep in the heart of Poland where the trees
grow as thickly as sugar cane,” he had said, pointing out the
place on the globe in the corner of the reading room. “You
don’t know what it is to live in fear,” he had continued.
“Sometimes you wished they would just catch up with you and get
it over with.”
The idea that the librarian must have given up passed through
my mind together with the thought that my own father had now
relinquished the very trade that had given him the strength to
travel to a new land across that vast ocean only to eventually
take his place mutely next to the window overlooking the
backyard of the tenement house. His words came back to me: “I
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 312
am trying to keep your mother’s hand from slipping away. One’s
life is a long wait; at times it is undertaken alone, other
times with someone else in mind. But the repose that is sought
from the time we open our eyes until we close them again is to
be found in the changing colors of the seasons and in the
flower seeds falling to the earth.”
Where could the old librarian have gone? There were very few
places to hide in the city. Most of the entrances to the
tenement buildings had been padlocked and the air was redolent
with the odor of the burned fat that seeped from the drains.
Just a few blocks and I would be able to see the window of his
apartment. The streetlights had not yet been lit, and I did not
feel the presence of anyone. From time to time an automobile
sped by as if it too pursued another.
Something told me to turn back. I entered the “Happy Bar” on
Adam Street. The place reeked of alcohol and seemed ready to
burst with anger. I sat in the corner, where I had a clear view
of the door and of the flickering light of a coffee shop across
the street. The men in black suits and dark glasses would not
dare enter here.
The row of men seated at the counter had their eyes fixed on
the mirror and on their glasses filled with beer or whiskey.
From the corner where I sat I could hear their heavy breathing.
They looked like endless rows of men condemned to the gallows,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 313
their faces revealing wounds they had received outside the
premises. Silently they begged for a moment of rest. The drinks
they swallowed swiftly lessened their pain and allowed them to
dream of green fields where the air was as soft as the breezes
that blew in on the first days of spring as if transported by a
swarm of yellow butterflies.
Smoke settled defiantly over the dim red lights of the
counter. The street had been taken over by the darkness of
night. The few remaining people had fallen quiet. The jukebox
stood soundlessly in the corner facing the pool table. There a
lonely player moved back and forth adjusting and readjusting
the one ball as he answered his own questions aloud in a way
that would have deceived anyone unable to see him. The
bartender looked at me, sensing that I was there by chance. “If
you are here to hide, it is best that you know that they won’t
come in here. They might be waiting for you outside.”
A knot formed in my throat, so that I was unable to say
anything for a moment. When I looked at him and nodded, the
gesture assured him of my appreciation. The man at the pool
table put change into the jukebox and pressed the buttons for
his songs. The hands of the clock on the wall behind the
counter appeared not to move. The slow beat of the music began
to take over the place, and the only person seated at the
counter was tapping his fingers to the familiar rhythm, his
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 314
mind floating to places accessible only to him. Invisible walls
separated each of us from one another.
The shivering sound of the East River nearby gnawed at the
abandoned riverboat, the dark waters choking the last lament
with iron chains while the slow tapping on the bar counter were
busy closing the wounds of old. The red had turned to brown on
the trunks of many of the trees lining each side of the river.
The sun dove behind the horizon just as it had done for
centuries, unmoved by the cries of the wind that knit together
hunger and humiliation. Dreams clung to the sky like sharp
needles to the hardened skin of the man gulping his last drink.
The empty glasses, like so many scattered sacred stones,
refused to foretell the future. The words from the jukebox sang
of golden paths deep into the blue of a clear sky. The city
fell sound asleep in white linen sheets like a voiceless and
unfeeling womb creating life in silence. The night had
imprisoned the sounds inside the white parchment of artistic
drawings held sacred by the select few. The tapping had ceased
completely by the time the man at the pool table turned to
throw his last dart against the dartboard. He was a dark,
unshaven figure, his hair laced back by a green thread, his
swollen eyes ringed with dark patches. There was deep anger
hidden in this man.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 315
“He has been coming here since last year,” said the bartender
as he placed the glass of wine I had asked for on my table. “No
one knows where he came from. Would you like anything else?”
The door had not opened since I had come in. I thought of the
old librarian’s warning. “They will never give up following
you; even in your dreams, you won’t be able to get rid of
them.”
The bartender had not taken his eyes from the man shooting
darts, although he had not said a word to him all night long. I
had always wondered what shape things took when seen from
behind the stage. Now, through the thick wall of smoke swirling
from corner to corner, I noted that the man who had been
tapping had lowered his head onto his crossed forearms. Night
had cushioned the flow of water on the East River. The corroded
chains barely held on to the riverboat. The tears of women and
hungry children quietly washed away, buoys of oblivion
suffocated by gray moss from the deep. A bone-deep loneliness
reigned over the bar. The man at the pool table had been
looking nervously at the clock, which indicated one hour before
closing time. “He has no place to go,” observed the bartender
as he picked up the empty wine glass from my table. “When he
leaves here,” he continued, “he goes from door to door trying
to find one left ajar by someone in a hurry. At sunrise he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 316
moves to the park just a few blocks from here, passing time by
feeding the pigeons with bits of discarded bread.”
I felt an inchoate fear taking hold of me. Unable to move
from my table, I thought of the stone steps of the Church of
the Dead in the main square of Sheshi, where the coolness of
the evening hours would be making its way to the water
fountain. The moonlight would soon fill the air with
bright,
crystalline dew gently falling on the blades of grass,
determined patches of life growing among the rocks. The line of
steps grew dimmer as the hours rolled by only to be replaced by
image of the raised skin of my mother’s hands.
I had left the basement bar the way I had found it. The
bartender had begun to wash and dry the few glasses over and
over again. The man with the crooked, tapping fingers had
buried his head deeper into his arms, and the drifter at the
pool table had begun to chalk the billiard stick. Night hovered
firmly over the neighborhood. The cool air fogged the few
streetlights still standing. A furtive wind had brought an
intermittent drizzle, and there was silence everywhere. The
waters on the East River, stilled by the cold air, seemed like
an old mirror with streaks of black running through it. Beneath
its surface the remaining drops of life moved inexorably toward
the deep silences of the ocean. The steel bridge covered with
the loneliness of times past wavered between the starless sky
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 317
and the murky waters below. Two tugboats, bows lowered, plied
the waters, which offered no resistance. It was well past
midnight. The clock on the corner bank, with its marble pillars
casting every other building around it into shadow, was itself
without light.
“Where could the old librarian have gone to hide? I will
return to the library in the morning. I am certain that the new
librarian has some information. There is no one following me,
and I will be home shortly. I must avoid the scene of the
murder. The victim, his face covered with blood, must have been
dumped someplace that very night. People are killed every day,
especially during the late hours. I must avoid the traps the
men in black suits and dark glasses lay.”
I could smell death all around Jackson Avenue, just like
Uncle Kanjiki could from the moment he returned to Sheshi from
the lands of eternal frost. He came back with his fingers
frozen to the bone. His return had prompted all the villagers
to think that death was sleeping among them and that terrifying
times lay ahead. In no time the townsfolk could smell death
everywhere, even on their own clothes. The authorities checked
the tombs in the cemetery to see if the cement had cracked.
They found that the burial grounds smelled of dry pine needles.
The women soon learned to place small pouches of the needles
among their clothes, and with the arrival of winter, the smell
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 318
of death abated. But when the ice melted in early March, the
odor once more became unbearable. Holding bouquets of dried
basil leaves to their noses after searching for nine days and
nine nights, the children of Sheshi were able to trace the foul
odor to Grandmother Faela’s house. She lived at the lower end
of the village, where the houses themselves moved with the
earth during the rainy season. The children found Uncle Kanjiki
sitting as close as he could to the fireplace burning an olive
log. It was then that the children learned of war and of the
odor of death that it leaves behind. “I saw people piled up
together like piles of dead leaves,” he told them. “The young
recruits picked the bodies up with a big shovel, almost ten
thousand of them, and threw them into deep pits raging with
fire. The smell infested our skin deeply; it even got into our
blood. You can smell it, but I can feel it night and day. It is
inside of me, nestling in every pore of my skin.”
From that day on, every young man in Sheshi vowed never to go
to war. Everyone in the village expected Uncle Kanjiki to die
before the end of the grape harvest, but, as things turned out,
he actually outlived everyone of his generation and the next.
Oddly, I had never smelled death in the old librarian, even
when we had sat close to one another looking for news about the
faceless victim on the iron railing. Years later, I learned
from a note he had written at the end of a page from a book he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 319
had read that the odor of death can only be snuffed out by blue
violets. “It is the only flower capable of concealing the smell
of death with the blue of the sky,” he had written in a deep,
red color.
At home, death arrived unannounced one winter day. It must
have been a Friday, for the loneliness of the day could be felt
in everything that I could behold. All stood still that
morning. The sky was a tapestry of dark clouds partially hiding
from view the tenement houses along Jackson Avenue. The
termites had stopped gnawing the inside of the furniture.
Mother suddenly regained the strength of her youth and arose
from her chair. Her cheeks were full and flushed, and her
forehead, clear of its maze of wrinkles, shone like those early
morning rays which work their way from branch to branch,
awakening the earth from its nightly torpor. With gestures
reminiscent of those she used years ago in our one-room home in
Sheshi overlooking the main square where the fountain leaned
against the fig tree, Mother went about the ritual of preparing
the morning coffee, taking the same degree of care as a Prefti
might use in celebrating Mass. Time had ceased to be as we all
sat at the table covered in white linen and set with the best
china and silverware. This was the last cup of coffee we ever
had together.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 320
The snow on Jackson Avenue had turned into ice. Mother rose
from her chair and walked slowly to her room, where she lay
down upon the long bed. Father remained seated, following the
flight of birds from tree-top to tree-top, unaware of what was
taking place. Without saying a word or meeting Father’s gaze,
Sister began to return things to their rightful places.
I reached the church only to find the main door padlocked
with a heavy chain. At the window of the one-story parish
house, a light gleamed ineffectually. I rang the bell on the
iron railing. As the clouds, as dark as night, loomed
threateningly overhead, I thought of the long journey we had
taken from the train station of Sheshi to Jackson Avenue. “Do
not look back at the village,” she had cautioned as we took our
seats in the empty car. Little had I known that she herself was
taking the town with her to the land across the ocean.
The priest, his eyes blood-shot and his body wrapped in a
checkered woolen blanket, opened the window and wearily
inquired what I wanted at that hour of the day. Regarding my
countenance more closely, however, he relented, saying, “I’ll
be there in half an hour. I just have to put on some warm
clothing to protect myself from the asthma.”
The next day the clouds appeared to be even darker, and the
warmer air produced an incessant drizzle. The few people who
accompanied us at a distance uttered no words. At the gate,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 321
protected by a wide, dark umbrella, the old librarian stood
motionless behind the pine tree, but he shook my hand when I
approached him. He regarded my sister, who had aged
precipitously, walk slowly with the rest of the family toward
the main exit of the cemetery as he added, “I was told by the
storekeeper on Jackson Avenue of the death in your family.” He
had started to walk away when he said, “The killing of the man
on the railing of Saint Mary’s Park never took place.” The
confidence with which he spoke left me speechless. “I will be
going away as far as I can. I have been walking ever since the
day the soldiers opened the gates of the halls of death.”
The librarian appeared to be even more frail and beset by
fear than when I had last seen him peering though his
spectacles. As I observed him, I noticed how the dark clouds
had dug deeper into the emptiness of the cemetery. Things had
certainly come to an end, and there had been no time to even
witness the changes. I leaned against the iron gate, a feeling
of impotence triggering a dry sensation of nausea within me. A
deeply-rooted loneliness blocked all the exits from the
cemetery. The dark sky has nestled onto the tree tops, already
bent by the constant drizzle.
The outline of the old librarian had melted in the distance.
I thought of the underground bar in Harlem and the tapping
curved fingers on the counter. The lonely figure of my sister
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 322
floating on the thick fog appeared to rest on the window sill
of the apartment. She had resumed the long wait for her suitor.
This day was to change the course of many things. Suddenly I
had become the anchor for my sister and for my younger brother,
who had enclosed himself in the world of childhood, determined
never to emerge.
The rains of the last days of autumn gave way to more
frequent snowstorms. Along the avenue leading to the elevated
subway, which was held up by steel pillars that bisected the
lower half of the city, the stores were decorated with the
usual Christmas lights. The glitter followed the footsteps of
the throngs of people moving from place to place. But the
festive mood stayed clear of our house. Tired of the furtive
glances of passersby, my sister had drawn the shades over the
front window and enclosed the memories of our recent loss
within the walls of our home.
Sister had replaced Mother in every way. Even her tone of
voice had assumed that of Mother. She, too, was determined, in
her own enigmatic way, to turn the clock back. Having found all
the memorabilia from the village which Mother had hidden in the
cedar chest, she now proceeded to fill every open space in the
apartment with them. “Mother saved these things for us so that
we could keep her image alive.” The bureau scarves and
antimacassars which Mother had sewn covered every conceivable
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 323
surface. Their every stitch spoke of the hundreds of people who
had left Sheshi for work in distant lands and of the trail of
unseen tears that followed them. I had promised myself to break
the silences of those lives stitched together in so many
colors, for I knew that my mother would be feeling my presence
even now, just as she always had in the hours before I would
return home. More than once I had actually felt her thoughts
mingling with mine as if to guide me or to relieve me of
unidentifiable pressures working in the bottomless intricacies
of my mind. “When God sends for me, your sister will watch over
you and the rest of the family,” she had said in moments of
uncertainty during the rainy days of November.
I stopped at the corner of Jackson Avenue and gazed at the
dilapidated tenement buildings. The fire escapes were the only
things still intact, although their black paint had dissolved
into dark brown rust. The buildings were half empty, their
windows broken, their ceilings charred. On the avenue, the
well-lit stores filled with holiday colors and gifts belied the
bleak air of the surroundings. Soon, as always seemed to be the
case, the buildings would be torn down, reduced to yet another
pile of debris. The memories of their former inhabitants would
be suffocated in a mountain of dust, loaded into trucks and
ferried away to fill an empty space or to clog underground
canals at the city’s edges, where the river formed a tight
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 324
collar. I studied the steady flow of people, all driven by a
restless urge to reach their invisible destination.
The noise of the river, swollen by recent rains, faded into
the depths of the city. The underground music traversed endless
cotton fields and marsh lands to feed the blood of wounds that
would not heal. Here, faces as pale as the fake snow piled in
the store windows, moved stiffly forward as if they belonged to
an army of wooden soldiers. The cold air had solidified in the
tree tops, gently bending the branches toward the streetlights.
In the dark tunnels of the subway lines, the homeless took
refuge while, above them, mothers dragged reluctant children
past the moving angels and Santa Clauses who bowed repeatedly.
Here, too, along the broad avenue, countless signs announced
the imminent demolition of abandoned buildings. The
conversations which had taken place on the front stoops were a
thing of the past. Not long before closing the shop, Father had
confessed to Mother his difficulties in finding our own home.
“Just the other day, I went out to buy milk because of the bad
weather, but when I got back I could not find any of the signs
that usually indicate the way. The loneliness I saw in the
faces of the people was such as I had never seen before. It is
a dreadful look that gnaws into your bones.” Mother had shown
no response.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 325
The letter from Sheshi which announced the return of a
relative to the village from the lands of the Orinoco coincided
with the arrival of the Arctic winds. “His father had waited
until his very last breath to see his son safely back home, but
it was not to be. He died with his eyes open.” Mother had
worked for hours to assemble these sounds. Soon after, news of
violent clashes along the Orinoco River filled the front page
of every newspaper. The people had finally found the one who
would lead them out of their misery; they had summoned the
strength to pull aside the mask they had worn for centuries.
Mother’s prophecy of the events to come could not have been
more accurate; from the kitchen window, she had pointed out
what the people along the Orinoco looked like. “Your relative
will look like one of them,” she had foretold. She had been
observing these newcomers for months as they had maintained the
backyards, cleaned the homes and maintained the structures.
They were always on the move, walking great distances with
apparent disinterest in the hubbub on the street. They kept
mostly to themselves, their thoughts turned, in all likelihood,
to their homes in faraway lands at the foot of forest-carpeted
peaks.
In the last letter he sent to us, my uncle had written, “My
son could not find his way out of the thick woods. The river he
called the Orinoco had become an ocean trapping everyone.” As
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 326
the cold, made more biting by the whipping wind, chilled me, I
recalled the face of my uncle, whom others called “the good
man.” He was the sort who would utter “Good evening” to the old
women seated on stone benches outside their homes whispering to
one another. “May the Virgin Mary keep you company.”
My uncle’s gentle, searching voice had a musical tone that
moved to tears all who heard it. “He is truly an angel sent to
us.” No explanation was ever found for the feeling of emptiness
his voice left in its wake. Each late afternoon the women sat
outside their homes waiting for Uncle Kanjiki to pass on his
way to the train station. Wearing a smile like that of an
infant clinging to the mother with whom it has shared a world
for nine months, he climbed the hill, convinced that his son
would be arriving on the five o’clock train. “My son will be
coming from the big city where the wheat plays in the fields
with the red poppies as they pursue the breezes from the blue
sea. At the train station, Uncle Kanjiki waited patiently,
straining to hear the locomotive emerging from the tunnel. As
soon as he heard an approaching train, he sprang to his feet
and advanced quickly toward the passengers, some of whom had
alighted in error. Among these were others who, back in Sheshi
after so many years, were both confused and virtually
unrecognizable. These, he pitied.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 327
But most of the time, no one got off the train, and the
station remained, as usual, all but abandoned. Nonetheless,
Uncle Kanjiki was not disconcerted by his son’s failure to
descend the rubber steps. “The eight o’clock train will be
pulling in just a few hours from now,” he mused. Later, full of
smiles, his eyes bright, his ears alert, he hovered near the
tunnel. This ritual was repeated until the last scheduled train
arrived late at night. Then, someone would come to the station
to fetch him home, where, after a night’s rest, he would arise
to resume the ceremony.
One morning, Uncle Kanjiki awoke before sunrise, as had been
his custom ever since he had served as a soldier in the
trenches of the snowy mountains. However, on that particular
morning it was soon evident that a high fever had invaded his
body. The hallucinations returned…those that brought back
images of soldiers exchanging greetings and news from their
respective countries right before attempting to kill one
another. The high fever kept Uncle Kanjiki at home; that is
where the devoted friend who escorted him from the train
station every night found him, unconscious, his legs swollen.
Even so, Uncle Kanjiki had managed to pull on his boots, which
were as shiny as they had been on the day of his return to
Sheshi. It was an event the town had never forgotten.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 328
It was spring, and the people of Sheshi were taking the icon
of the Virgin of Constantinople in a procession from the chapel
to the main church. The sacristan, unaware that all activity
had stopped, continued to ring the church bells, but everyone
else was looking at the soldier with the long beard and the
skeletal face with deeply sunken, frightened eyes. No one in
the front of the procession had recognized him except for a
woman dressed in black, an old aunt on his mother’s side. She
grasped his hand and they walked home together without saying a
word. Hundreds of eyes accompanied them from behind the
curtains and doors left ajar. His mother, inside the one-room
home with its small, round window broken through the thick
stone wall over the door, had already started the fire with the
dry olive logs she had kept since the year he had left. As his
aunt left with the words, “I’ll go and bring your wife and
children here,” his mother and her sister-in-law seated him
gently on the wooden chair next to the fireplace. No sooner had
Uncle Kanjiki felt the warmth of the woolen blanket placed over
his knees than he fell asleep. In his mind, he was trying to
remember each of his children, starting with the youngest, who
had been barely able to stand the day he had left for the
front. He could not recall his wife at all. Fear, caused by the
dread which the piercing explosions had imprinted in his brain,
had erased the image of his life-long companion. The children,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 329
however, always came to him during the cold nights as he kept
watch over the icy landscape. He would play and roll over in
the thin air with them until the early morning hours when the
next soldier came to relieve him. Helped by the others, he
would be set next to the burning logs of an open fire and given
a hot cup of coffee. The bitter brew brought him back to the
harshness of the cold and the depth of the fear which had
settled over everyone in the trenches.
One night the soldiers on the other side of the icy field
began to yell and promptly launched an attack. My uncle was
left behind, taken for dead. When or how the battle had
evolved, he could not remember. He awoke in a military
hospital, unable to move half of his body. The war had already
come to an end and an armistice had been signed in a red
caboose when the killing between the soldiers in the two facing
trenches began. No one of the dispatches reached the soldiers,
whose position was unlisted on the war maps. The war ended as
it had begun, although, perhaps, with more anger. Unable to
find their way back home, endless lines of soldiers sat down in
the road and waited for the sun to rise from behind the
horizon. They covered their tired legs with the blankets the
army had given them to take home. It was wrapped with one of
those blankets, dark blue in color, that Uncle Kanjiki reached
Sheshi after months of forgetfulness. All he could remember was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 330
the name of the village half asleep at the foot of the seven
mountains, but the train master had no trouble locating it on
his old map. “It is the last stop on the line that comes from
the narrow sea.”
Now Uncle Kanjiki’s wife appeared at the house. Nothing
stirred inside of him. He did not even recognize her voice. “He
is not my husband,” she announced abruptly. At that, his
mother’s eyes filled with tears, which she tried to contain,
lest her son notice them. In fact, she was the only one who was
completely certain of his identity. Even the aunt who had
caught sight of him approaching the procession had acted more
on instinct than conviction. “The war can really change
people,” his mother declared firmly. But the grave look she
directed at her daughter-in-law did little to dissuade the
younger woman, who took her leave with a bit of unwelcome
advice: “You should notify the authorities so that they can
help this poor soul regain his mind.”
Her husband had inclined his head towards the fire, seeing
only the image of the hospital and recalling his futile
attempts all day long to move his legs. On the other side of
the fireplace his mother and aunt sat scrutinizing his features
to see if they fell into the proper alignment. Each, unaware of
the other’s efforts, went back in time to relive the three full
days of torment that had preceded his birth. They hoped to see
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 331
in his face now the full autumn moon that had been so red as to
convince every frightened villager that an archangel had been
born in their midst. But the soldier sat unmoved, almost hiding
under the blanket, his head resting on his knees as the two
women recalled how everyone in the village had burned dried
oregano to ward off the dark fumes that descended from the red
moon.
The mother, Luza, relived every detail of the birth,
retracing every feature of her son from the moment the creature
was shown to her. In the briefest of moments, she traversed the
road of his time. She looked at him now, helpless and beaten,
as if unable to fend off the snake in the bloody pond which was
pulling him down, exhausting and drowning him. She was
determined to stand there until that snake would have to come
up for air. Then, she would attract him with her milk and free
her son. She sat facing the tired and forlorn body of the
soldier whose impenetrable mind might remain closed to her
forever. At that very instant she began to assume the imposing
figure of her great-grandmother Falucia as the forgotten shape
of the great serpent in the cave underneath the village began
to stir in the deep silence of the home. The mother glanced
fixedly into the flames burning chestnut wood. She waited
patiently for the sizzling of the snake as it emerged from the
fireplace, intent upon not confusing the sound with that of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 332
burning cinders being pulled up by the cold air of the stone
chimney.
Still, it wasn’t long before the mother herself gave in to
the sleep-inducing warmth. She saw a long procession of women,
dressed all in black, with their heads bent and their hair
disheveled, moving towards the cave of the sacred serpent. She
felt her youth condensing in the deepest part of her womb. She
followed the wailing cortège at a distance, gripped by an
uncertain pain around her waist that grew as the dark
silhouettes drew closer to the cave. The olive groves on each
side of the dirt road shone as clearly as the full moon at the
sky’s zenith. Suddenly she felt a familiar touch on her back.
It was her great-grandmother Falucia, recognizable by the
endless wrinkles on her forehead. She felt safe. She still
remembered how Falucia’s milk had tasted in her hungry mouth.
“I was waiting for you to come and join us,” her greatgrandmother whispered. Her voice, once soft, had become as
rough as that of her great-grandfather, Tuci. Now she followed
Falucia, holding onto her skirt as the pain in her navel
increased steadily. The procession reached the inside of the
cave by following the flow of the winding brook. There the
women washed their faces with the water dripping from the
porous walls of the ancient cave. Then they uttered
indecipherable incantations to the snake that twirled and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 333
raised its head, sending piercing sounds to the hundreds of
beaming eyes reflected in the inner pool at the center of the
cave. The great-grandmother, her face fierce, held the young
girl by the waist, removed her clothes swiftly and dipped her
into the center pool. The serpent swam straight forward,
attracted by the shadow of the young girl, who trembled with
fear as her great-grandmother let go of her. She felt a gentle
pain, unlike any other, that made her quiver as tiny drops of
blood rolled down her thighs into the water. The sight caused
the women to howl lamentations. It was then that Falucia gave
her great-granddaughter the red-stained cloth, neatly folded
into the shape of a poppy. “Go home and hide this cloth deep in
the earth between the two ancient olive trees in the meadow
between the village and the cemetery,” she instructed.
“I
remember seeing my own mother touch each of the olive trees
with tears in her eyes. But then I preferred to chase the many
butterflies that swirled among the poppies.”
Not many years thereafter, Luza’s mother, Faela, took her to
see the white owl with the half-moon-shaped face fly from the
cliff at the bottom of the village up into the pomegranate
tree. Faela offered the owl the hearts of her two chickens,
killed to hasten the return of her husband, Dilj, from those
faraway lands where the seasons cling all into one and the soft
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 334
breezes make people forget that time moves and memories fade
into the distant places of the mind.
Of course, I did not realize at the time that my own greatgrandmother, Vijia, would urge me to follow in the footsteps of
Mother, saying “Go now and hide your cloth. I shall wait where
the road disappears into the winding brook below the cliff.”
Luza followed the footsteps of her mother, Faela, and recalled
the smell of the dry oat fields on the side of the road that
led to the olive grove. I looked for a sharp rock with which to
dig and bury the cloth. I was told to do it before the sun rose
from where the tallest of the seven mountains stole the color
from the sky. The spot was marked by the pomegranate plant
whose seeds she had received from her own grandmother as a
child. The stars had begun to fade away, chased from the sky by
the rays of the sun, when Luza reached the road of the four
crosses where her mother, Faela, waited in silence. Together
they climbed the steep ravine that led to the first stone road
of Sheshi. The white adobe houses of the oldest part of the
village were reddened by the early lights of dawn piercing
through the tall pine trees of the seven mountains. On their
way to the square of the fountain, the mother and daughter
encountered a line of people loading their beasts of burden for
an early start upon work in the wheat fields. Unperturbed by
the two women, who walked as if burdened by the weight of time,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 335
they continued to load their beasts. “May you walk with God,”
said Faela to the one who kept the best fields in the village.
“May you return with the mother of Christ,” answered the redfaced Roshi, who the people of Sheshi thought of as a man with
the hands of Saint Joseph. The sun turned bright yellow on the
door of their home, warming the stone seat where the figs were
set to dry for the winter. The house had been sprayed with
dried oregano leaves and the door left ajar by Mother Faela.
She had waited with a trembling heart the return of her
daughter. Inside the house, Faela quickly returned to her own
self, although with some anxiety. Her daughter, Netia had
matured into a complete woman. “From now on,” Faela told her
daughter in a surprisingly submissive voice, you shall open and
close the door to our home. I have polished the key with
vinegar and placed it in the opening above the fireplace.” That
was the last time her mother had spoken to her.
As Luza opened her eyes and the cinders turned into ashes in
the fireplace, she saw that the blue patches under her son’s
eyes were now completely dark. The uniform he wore still had
deep tears. “I shall mend it,” she said to herself, “so that
the people of Sheshi can see the colors of war and the cries of
death in the copper buttons.”
Luza rose from the wicker chair she herself had woven as two
drops of blood fell onto the stone base of the fireplace. When
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 336
she took the wooden pail and placed some hot ashes on them,
their odor awakened in her son the arduous road of return still
in his eyes. Kanjiki was painfully aware of the long nights in
the trenches with the rains and the deep mud that reached up to
his knees, paralyzing him more than the fear of a stray bullet
coming from the enemy’s lines just two hundred yards ahead. The
days had been long and the nights even longer. He remembered
clearly the words the soldiers exchanged with one another. “Can
you tell me why it is easier to die than to kill?” The soldiers
had all become brothers in the face of so much suffering.
“There is hot coffee and a blanket for you to rest; use bed
number five.”
“In my company there were only ten beds for the one hundred
soldiers left alive. It was the only time I could clearly
picture my wife and children in my mind,” recalled Kanjiki as
he moved closer to the fireplace. The guilt of not having
resisted those soldiers who had come to get him that late
afternoon as he was returning home after clearing the
undergrowth from the olive trees had never left him. Night
after night he relived the helpless image of his wife as they
forced him inside the carriage with the other recruits. The
children, oblivious, had been following a long column of ants
busily taking their provisions down the hole the youngsters had
found when they turned over a pile of leaves. “I did not even
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 337
have time to say good-bye to them.” The people of Sheshi had
come out of their homes to see Kanjiki being taken to the train
station in a single file with twenty others from the village.
“I felt the guilt grow inside of me as the bell on the wall of
the train station announced the arrival of the train.”
Now Luza brought her son a cup of hot tea prepared with dry
poppy seeds. The familiar taste dispelled the feeling of
rejection he had seen in his wife’s gray eyes. Luza drew the
woolen blanket up to his neck and crossed his forehead three
times, reciting ancient orations that she had learned on the
nights before the birth of Jesus, the One who understood all
things.
Henceforth, Kanjiki slept for many nights and many days. When
he finally awoke, he asked his mother for his wife and
children. Luza hesitated, pretending to gather more wood for
the fireplace. “I want to be taken home,” her son said in a
more determined tone.
“Your wife did not come to see you when your great aunt
brought you down from the main square,” Luza replied, with the
understanding of a mother sharing the grief of her child. He
remained stupefied, not knowing what to make of her words, but
he managed to get up from the wooden seat with some difficulty
and to assert decisively, “I will go home now!”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 338
Realizing his resolve, Luza offered to walk down the road with
him. Kanjiki could not remember the way home, even though he had
walked it so many times, for his own house had once belonged to
his paternal grandfather. The one-story house was known to
everyone in Sheshi because of the pomegranate tree which
inebriated the whole village with its odor when it bloomed in
the early spring. Not a door opened as mother and son descended
the narrow street. “Where is everyone?” Kanjiki mumbled to his
mother as he clutched her arm, feeling weaker with every step he
took. “Many have moved up North to search for work; they just
locked their doors and took the keys with them, not saying
whether they were coming back one day. The war was too long and,
with the men gone, the wives could not have the children
starve.”
Things were beginning to make sense to him. With some
trepidation, he lowered his eyes, noting how an inexplicable
sense of foreboding accompanied the urge to see his children. As
they approached the fountain of the sweet waters, Kanjiki
recognized the house with the two nooks on each side of the
door. Wild oregano had grown all over the front of the house,
and the chestnut door was weather beaten, its bottom almost
totally warped. The house was steeped in an air of loneliness,
sadness written all over its face. As Kanjiki saw that there
were no children playing in front of the house, he knew that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 339
there was no one inside. “Where have they gone?” he inquired
sadly.
“Your wife did not recognize you and, out of fear, too the two
youngest to her mother’s village. The oldest has gone to a place
he calls “the mountain of paradise…at least, that is what he
wrote in the only letter he has sent since his departure. He
could not wait to leave after he searched for you for months
through the mountains of perennial snow. I cannot forget the
night he returned, announcing so assuredly that you would never
come back. He told everyone in the village that he had seen
enough dead to fill a train that would stretch from our station
to the city of the glittering waters. He was determined not to
end like one of those soldiers with fear still in their eyes,
piled one on top of the other like discarded rags.”
The sense of guilt Kanjiki felt now had begun to open a deep
wound in his chest. “I think it’s best that we return home. I
will give her time to come back when she feels the need to. As
for my son, I shall be waiting for his return starting
tomorrow.” He made this vow unwittingly, not realizing that the
long wait for his son was to become his agony and that he would
close his eyes without ever closing the wound gnawing at his
chest. But as the night is followed by the day, Kanjiki never
lost hope. It gave him the strength in the long hot days of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 340
summer and the short cold days of winter to scale the hill to
the train station.
Luza never attempted to dissuade her son from his ritual;
instead, she ended up believing in his dream as much as he did.
Morning after morning she would awaken him at exactly the same
time, not one minute before nor one minute after. Together they
drank the cup of dark coffee sweetened with one spoonful of
sugar she made from her own beets and then they walked half-way
to the train station. The mother waved to her son before she
entered the Church of the Dead on top of the hill to begin her
prayers, which lasted until the sun brightened the whole
interior of the church.
The clock on Sheshi’s town hall tower was running far ahead of
Luza. She barely heard the tolling which for so many years had
corresponded to the kind of work she was to undertake. From the
old fountain in the main square, the elders followed the daily
footsteps of Luza and her son. For the mother and son, time
stood still. They aged unaware of the process. Sheshi had also
begun to change quickly. The young and the old no longer
strolled freely back and forth in the square, and the topics of
discussion, when they did take place, referred to faraway places
that only a few could identify.
And so it was that the day came when a high fever invaded
Kanjiki’s whole body. He still managed to get out of bed that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 341
morning. He was more determined than ever, despite an uneasy
premonition, to climb the steep hill to the train station and to
sit in his usual place to wait for his son, counting every train
that passed en route to the city of the frigid winds. Kanjiki’s
legs buckled as he rose from the bed, but, with his mother’s
help, he sat on the wooden bench next to the fireplace. Even
though the logs were still burning brightly, he felt chilled
deep in every bone as he drank the cup of coffee mixed with
poppy seeds.
Luza noticed that the pallor in her son’s face was being
invaded relentlessly by blue patches. She had seen this change
take place in people many times ever since her own mother had
taken her to the neighbor’s house to look upon a dying person.
“It is best that you look death in the face,” her mother had
said when Luza was just six. She knew then that living was
nothing else but preparing for that final moment, and everything
was just a way of avoiding the constantly lurking shadows. “Poor
child,” she murmured, feeling an indolent pain deep in her
chest. “He was destined never to build a bridge between his eyes
and those of his son.” With dry eyes, Luza washed her hands with
water boiled with bay leaves and proceeded, with great effort,
to place her son over a clean white sheet on her own bed. She
scraped every speck of dust from his body and bathed him with
holy water. She ironed his white shirt carefully and placed a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 342
tie around his neck to match the dark grey suit. He looked the
way he had on the day he married the woman who, at that time,
could see inside of him deeper than anyone else in the village.
Finding her black woolen shawl among her prized possessions,
Luza folded it into a triangle and drew it over her head and
mouth. The few people in the neighborhood who happened to be
outside knew upon seeing her that death had lodged in Luza’s
home. By the time she returned there with the village Prefti,
whom she had to awaken from his usual afternoon nap, the bells
of the Church of the Dead were announcing the death of the
returned soldier with their usual melancholy. The sound pierced
the townspeople’s hearts and filled them with trepidation. The
Prefti, mumbling prayers from the small breviary that he kept
inside the front pocket of his black tunic, sprinkled holy water
over the body stretched out upon the sparkling white sheet. He
was taken by the serene smile that had settled over the face of
the dead soldier; it was a smile that he was not to forget for
years to come. At times, especially when awakening from his nap,
he wondered if that smile were not, indeed, an indication of the
promised life that the Church fathers had spoken and written
about in so many languages.
Kanjiki’s wife learned of his death the next day, but she was
not among the long procession of women dressed in black who
accompanied the casket half way towards the road that led to the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 343
cemetery. At the chapel under the mountain, they placed a wreath
on each of the three wooden crosses. Then only the men carried
the casket to the small chapel in the cemetery. There it lay for
three full days with relatives taking turns watching over it for
any signs of life that might have been overlooked. My Uncle
Kanjiki was buried in the family lot with all his kin of years
past, and with them he would watch over the others as they
waited for their turn to dive into the blue pool of water.
On her return to the village after the third day, Luza was
certain that the dark figure with the black shawl over her face
was that of her daughter-in-law. She cursed her for denying her
son peace of mind before his death, and she vowed never to allow
her into her home, knowing that her curses had never failed her.
From then on, Luza remained dressed in black. For awhile, she
tended her fields only when everyone else had left their own
plots to return home, but soon after, she placed a lock on her
door.
Years later, some distant relatives attempted to sell the
house. No buyer came forward, for those who remembered anything
of the terrible destiny of the wandering soldier did not dare
violate the accursed space. Rumors spread quickly, especially
fortified by those who shared the same neighborhood, that a
mysterious person had been seen painting the front door and
filling in the cracks between the stones in the front wall night
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 344
after night. Others insisted that, as they prepared to go to the
fields in the hours before sunrise, they would see a person
seated on the front stone bench, his face buried in his hands.
The laments he emitted awoke in everyone nearby a strong urge to
cry. His piercing cries only stopped when the sun hit the front
entrance of the house and dried the pool of water that formed
there every morning. The letters my father received from Sheshi
month after month never failed to mention those cries and that
pool of water. “It is as blue as the sky, but no one dares to
look into it.” In time, the neighbors, unable to sleep,
abandoned the surrounding homes, and the steps leading from
Luza’s house to the main square became impassable.
Sheshi was changing faster than at any previous time. “One of
these days, no one will be able to return home,” the elders
grumbled as they strolled around the main square, placing one
foot in front of the other with all the strength they could
muster. The old-timers could see the changes more clearly than
the young ones, who moved along freely but were unaware of what
was taking place in the olive groves that lined the road leading
to the train station.
The day the eldest son of the now almost forgotten dead soldier
got off the five-thirty train, Sheshi was experiencing the
hottest summer ever. The only living thing that accompanied him
from the station down the hill and through the narrow streets
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 345
that led to the house whose image he had reviewed every night
before falling asleep on his front porch surrounded by palm
trees was a limping black dog dragging his tail. Every door and
window of the village was shut tight to thwart the heat and to
mute the buzzing of the cicadas. He carried only a small
suitcase with a few of his personal belongings. Among them was a
photograph of the woman who had saved his life on the mighty
river whose source was the great ocean of the Pacific waters.
Whenever he looked at her image, he recalled the moment he awoke
on the hammock tied between two palm trees and looked for the
first time into her amber eyes, brightened even more by the
white-washed houses around her. The breeze that day had been as
soft as the one he remembered in Sheshi on the first day of
spring. He was destined to relive that moment… sometimes with
others, but mostly alone… for the rest of his life as the sun
began to hide behind the seven mountains. “It all began with the
sky blackening and the wind toppling trees. Two of my friends
and I had decided to take the boat down the Orinoco River and
join thousands of others in search of gold in the ravines of the
green mountains. It was a damp, foggy morning. The sun was
blocked by dark clouds that carried the smell of burning trees.
The boat, carried along by a swift current, crashed against the
many tree trunks floating in the river. The fog prevented us
from seeing each other as the slimy air and the penetrating
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 346
sounds of the jungle added to our fear and confusion. The three
of us said nothing as the waters grew murkier. We lashed
ourselves to the center seat of the boat to avoid tumbling over
if we fell asleep. The night rushed by. The next morning, the
sun’s rays revealed a mountain riddled by thousands of caves and
overrun by prospectors who, as so many ants, dug furiously as
they held onto long ropes running from the bottom to the top of
the mountain. The sky darkened quickly and the heavy rains that
followed forced us to take to higher ground. It was in the heart
of the jungle that we became separated. I heard my companions’
screams, but I could not locate them. I cannot say how long I
walked until she found me. I felt my body heavy with leeches. I
was being sucked in by the force of the jungle, a power unlike
any other. It was the woman in this photograph, always so quiet,
who saved me from the blood suckers. I can still smell the odor
of the burning leaves that cleared my mind of the sounds of the
deep woods. She was a good woman. I can still hear the wind
blowing through her hair and see the clear waters of the river
mirroring in her eyes. But her face in the photograph does not
say anything. She knows I had to come back to see my father. I
learned that the war had ended from an old newspaper blown to my
feet as I watched the dolphins with the breasts of a woman feed
their young. Of Sheshi I remembered clearly the train station
and the road to the left that led to the next village inhabited
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 347
by dark, curly-haired people who looked so much alike that no
one was able to tell them apart. They used to say that, at
night, everyone in that village turned into a crow, feeding on
the carcasses of dead animals.”
Kanjiki’s son, Zini, looked about and took stock. Gone were
the trees with the white flowers that used to line that road to
the next village. They had been usurped by tall buildings with
front and back balconies. The water fountain only dripped
intermittently now, the few drops of water drying upon the
burning basin. Down below, the old part of Sheshi, choked with
sunlight, appeared abandoned. Wild weeds had invaded the cracks
between the stones because the streets had been empty of playing
children for years. The hunting sparrows no longer chased
butterflies among the fig leaves. Zini could do no more than
sense the presence of the old women who hid behind the doors to
their homes, frightened by the presence of the young men who
returned to the village with strange ways.
Zini recognized his great aunt’s house, its grounds now invaded
by the prickly “driza” that at one time had only grown around
the entrance to the sacred cave. He recalled his great aunt’s
words, “I always leave the door open so that the house can
breathe.” Now the door was shut tightly, tented in a canopy of
spider webs. Zini recognized the chiseled volcanic stones his
great-uncle Selimi has shaped like soft twigs, hiding in them
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 348
the thirst of his imagination. There had not been a father in
Sheshi who did not wish to have one of his sons become an
apprentice to Selimi, but he had refused to comply. “It is not
something that anyone can learn. I myself do not know what
guides my fingers to work that stone.” At first that answer was
taken as a sign of arrogance by those in the village, but, with
the passing of time, they began to recognize that there was some
truth in what Selimi said. His own children were unable to do
what their father did. The seat by the side entrance to the
house still shone as it had the day Selimi had announced his
work was finished. Soon after, his fingers became wracked with
pain and misshapen. He salved them with a cream his wife made
from the soft bark of a licorice root and kept them inside
woolen gloves. In no time, Selimi’s head began to grow visibly
larger. To those who wanted to know why his skull was expanding,
he answered that it was because he could no longer let out the
images that were begging to escape. He became all head, until
the musty afternoon when he choked to death. When his wife found
the glass of water untouched, she knew her husband was no longer
with her. She found the first three letters of her name
scribbled on the front table where he rested his curved fingers.
Later in the day, as he returned to the main square, Zini
learned that it had been his great aunt who had accompanied his
father to his grandmother’s house. At the café they confirmed
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 349
that she had guided his father home, disoriented as he was. “The
conductor who helped your father get off the train said he
remembered the name of the train station only when a lone
passenger standing in front of the exit uttered the name
‘Sheshi.’ It was Besniki returning home from his chestnut grove.
He carried Kanjiki on his shoulders half way to the main square.
Your father carried such a heavy burden that not even the
station master identified him.”
“The village seems half deserted, although I can sense the
hidden eyes behind the doors scrutinizing every move that I
make. The woman silently follows me just a few paces behind. An
oppressive air emanates from the white-washed homes on both
sides of the narrow street. There is fear lurking behind the
closed windows. It must be like the cold shudder I felt when I
opened my eyes after the rains in the thickness of the jungle.
The sounds of the unseen lasted for days. A hand guided me
through the main street of the village. Pile dwellings soaked in
water. The silence ended when the plants absorbed every drop of
water.”
“There is no one living here,” said the woman who followed
behind Zini. The many steps that ended in the font of the house,
at one time filled with flowers that smelled of early dawn, were
no longer there. The rains of the past years had deposited a sea
of granite pebbles. Zini sat on the broken stone seat that stood
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 350
on the side of Benjamini’s house. Even the cats were gone. “I
knew then that my father was dead and the house had been
abandoned.” Never again would anyone live inside Kanjiki’s
house. It had been given to him by his father on his wedding
day. “Keep it well,” he had admonished. “It has been in our
family for as long as I can remember. The memories inside will
never allow a stranger to inhabit it.”
The heat of the afternoon had already hidden beneath the red
roof tiles. Zini recalled waiting patiently for his father to
return home from the fields. One day he had brought back the
nest of a rare blue bird. “It sings like the angels in church on
Sunday,” he had confided. Zini thought, “I helped the blue bird
grow its feathers and then I let it go on top of the fig tree
down the ravine.” That had been the last time that the people of
Sheshi had seen Kanjiki’s son. He had taken with him the
memories of his home and the sound of the cicadas in the heat of
the day.
What
Zini would never be able to forget was the callousness
with which his father’s mother had received him. “You killed
your father more than the war in that forsaken land,” Luza had
said. Those words gnawed at Zini for the rest of his life. “Have
the decency, at least,” she had added with an even sterner
scowl, “to visit his grave on the east side of the cemetery next
to the pine tree with the darkest bark.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 351
“I knew exactly the place she indicated. As children we used to
hide behind that trunk convinced that it warded off the souls
who wandered without finding a place to rest. From the hills
watching the sun turn pale orange, we followed the slow movement
of the caravan of peasants returning to Sheshi from the fields,
much as their ancestors had done throughout the centuries.” Zini
returned to his grandmother’s house, but he found it closed. The
toothless woman who had followed him since his arrival came up
to say that it was the time that Luza prayed in the Church of
the Dead. “She never misses a day.”
Zini took the road that led to the train station, where he
waited for the five o’clock train. “I can still feel the cold
wind descending from the mountain as I waited for that train. It
was a punishing wind that made my teeth chatter. I looked around
and felt the silenced nestling on top of the chestnut trees. I
would have given anything to have said good-bye to my
grandmother. It also became clear that I would never come back
to the place where I first began to look for ways to catch those
butterflies that filled the people of Sheshi with dreams and
forced them to leave their homes.” The sun was rapidly setting
behind the seven mountains. The lines of people waiting to
embark in the city of the sea were no longer there. Zini spent
the remaining days of his life in the land of the palm trees and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 352
endless sunshine, measuring time by the heights of the waves and
the songs of the gulls surfing between the sky and the ocean.
The snow was still coming down as I moved along with them,
inching toward the main avenue. The lights on Southern Boulevard
were fewer and unsteady as a lazy army of snow flakes fell over
them. Jackson Avenue was completely deserted. The electric lines
had been snatched from the cables. The silence that reigned in
the tenement houses was broken now and then by the rustling of
the rats going through the garbage cans. The sharp fingernails
of the cold night scraped incessantly upon the cement between
the bricks. In the house, my sister was sitting motionless, her
fingers crossed over her black dress. “How could you have stayed
away from home on the day we buried our dead?” she challenged.
Inside the house everything was in order, dusted and polished.
The next morning would bring a new beginning.
I spent the night making and remaking the image of Uncle
Kanjiki and the futile waiting for his son, Zini, to return home
from the place he never located on any map of the world. In a
way, we are all waiting for that one encounter that will open
the door that allows us to see the space where the eyes see no
light and the hands lose their sense of touch and emptiness is
all around, painless. From afar, throngs of people seeking
refuge in their automobiles moving among the shadows of the neon
lights darkening the fading colors of distant skies. Others,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 353
many others, place their antennae eyes inside the glass cubicles
filled with objects that enslave their desires like childhood
toys. Still others labor late at night when the dilapidated
buildings, crowned with corroded fire escapes, rule the night
with their silent guns. The clouds dive incessantly into the
murky waters of the East River. The house numbers move from
place to place, enslaving those who fall into the quicksand of
the shoreline. Abortive screams leave no trail of their bloody
prisons.
Winter had finally been swept away by the soft winds of spring
streaming in from where the sunsets in the late afternoon on the
tallest hill of Saint Mary’s Park. Out tenement home was the
only one left standing on Jackson Avenue. Around it, halfstanding in a welter of scattered bricks, were derelict
structures, their roofs caved in. the different faces and voices
that had inhabited the steps of those former homes had vanished.
Gone also were the Sunday visits of my father’s few remaining
acquaintances. The closing of the barber shop had brought
everything to an end.
Sister, still dressed in black, had taken charge of preserving
the memories of our home. The memorabilia, cleaned and dusted
daily, remained where it had been placed on the day Mother, my
younger brother Lini and I had arrived. “This is your new home,”
my father had exulted as he opened the door. Mother had tried in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 354
vain to fill the apartment with the memories of the old house in
Sheshi. As years went by, what had been left behind managed to
take complete control of the new. Sister was determined to fight
the ravages of time. She rarely went out and on the door she
placed a second lock; indeed, she showed no interest at all in
the world outside. She echoed
Mother even in her choice of
words. Slowly the home turned into a world in itself and became
estranged to its surroundings.
I returned to school but I no longer walked over the bridge
that connected the two boroughs of the city. The days succeeded
one another in their usual routine. “Your coffee is ready,”
Sister would announce in the morning as she reached for the cup,
cleaned it and placed it on one end of the table. The simmering
coffee pot filled the kitchen with a familiar aroma that
silenced the ticking of the clock on top of the gas stove. For
herself, Sister would take the blue-flowered cup brought from
Sheshi, wipe it with a damp cloth, fill it half way with coffee
and, with an utterly natural air, take her place next to the
window. It was a morning ritual carried on daily from season to
season. “I left the white shirt on your bed. It is freshly
ironed,” she would add without taking her glance from the
window.
The city bus on the avenue was rarely full. It went through
different neighborhoods, each clearly marked by colors and the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 355
canopies on the windows before it reached the bridge. The street
signs carried the names of people each neighborhood venerated. A
crowd of young men played handball against a front brick wall.
The sidewalk was a maze of disharmonious sounds, and at each
window trembling hands grasped the iron bars. Against this
backdrop of brown and gray and perforated bricks, the passersby
moved unevenly to the beat of a saxophone coming from the
underground. The city bus moved along, stopping only when a
potential passenger hailed it. On each side of the road, grayish
eyes watched, filled with memories of past voyages from the
river of sweat to the drowning waves of the high seas. One saw
row after row of impenetrable faces.
In the school library, I took my usual place. The reading room
was empty as it usually was in the late afternoon. It was not
difficult to imagine hearing the sounds of words within the many
books lining the wooden shelves. It was during just such an
afternoon that I saw the young girl with long black hair. She
took her seat at the end of the table and fixed her eyes on the
book she carried. It was a copy of Musil’s novel, “The Man
Without Qualities.” The girl’s round face and high cheekbones
placed her North of the European continent. This was the time of
student protests against the invasion of Cuba. The move from one
building to another was accomplished in complete silence. Even
deeper was the silence in the classrooms. Those in power held a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 356
tight grip on the dissenters. Days went by without either of us
changing places in the reading room. The strong rays of light
from the upper windows to the reading table bathed her face in
the dying colors of the sunset. The big clock on the wall had
just struck six. I decided not to leave before she did. She had
sat motionless since her arrival. Her face was slowly moving
into the deeper hues of the sunset. I recalled the face of
Elvira hiding behind the glass window on the last days of fall.
The letters that came from Sheshi never failed to mention her,
even though the fear of isolation was getting the best of her.
“There is not a young man in Sheshi who does not suffer from the
sickness of love that Elvira sends to them on the wings of white
doves,” the letters stated. “She has inherited the disease from
her mother,” was the explanation my father would receive from
mother. Every elder in Sheshi was consulted about the sickness,
and even a delegation was sent to the city to further inquire
about the plight affecting the young men of the village. The
affliction forced the men to hide at home for fear of being seen
wetting their pants during unforeseen attacks. The only person
in Sheshi who knew with some certainty where to find the source
of the ailment was the forgotten blind man whom years ago the
people referred to as the custodian of the Icon of the Virgin of
Constantinople.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 357
His home, to the right of the chapel, had the shape of a
Byzantine cross. The walls were filled with the figures of
winged naked angels shooting arrows toward the starry ceiling.
“Get rid of the droppings of the white doves,” he advised those
who had come to speak about the mysterious ailment. But,
although this answer did not convince any of them, they all felt
a sense of loss next to the blind man. The custodian, well
dressed and clean shaven, emitted an inebriating odor. The first
time he walked to the village, there was no woman who did not
open the windows of her home wide in order to inhale deeply the
intoxicating perfume with which they fed their most intimate
dreams in the lonely hours of the night. The fear of every woman
in Sheshi was to mention accidentally the name of the intruder
when given to the pleasures of dreams.
The men themselves fell prey to the same reveries and lived
with a similar fear of being discovered. Night after night, they
found themselves falling into a swamp filled with pigeon
droppings, while the women danced savagely amidst swarms of
yellow butterflies. During their morning coffee, the women
dismissed the dreams silently as bad memories from childhood,
but the men never mentioned them to anyone. In both sexes, the
dream induced some symptoms of asthma that seemed to aggravate
the act of breathing when in the presence of the blind man who
smelled of brilliantine. The connection between their dream and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 358
the blind man was finally made on his third appearance in
Sheshi. In the butcher shop in the heart of town it was decided
by all to rid Sheshi once and for all of the terrible disease
that had invaded every home.
Among them they chose by lot the one who was to carry out the
deed. Then they took an oath of silence, signed in blood in the
form of a cross. The long knives with the crooked teeth were
meticulously sharpened. The task fell to the youngest of the
group. He was known by everyone in the village as the shy boy
who only spoke to the flowers and birds in the hills beyond the
river Lumi. Driti had the rare gift of seeing behind darkness
and hearing the sounds of the underground brooks. During the
drought of the last two years, Driti had saved every animal from
dying of thirst.
The shepherds around Sheshi and the villages on the other side
of the seven mountains had walked great distances searching for
the underground pool of waters among the clusters of poplar
trees as they had done for generations. One evening, the
shepherds gathered in the main square to announce to everyone
that there was no water to be found around the seven mountains.
The herds of sheep, their ribs visible, did the rest to convince
the others of the gravity of the situation. A sense of
foreboding soon entered every household in Sheshi. The village
Prefti, forgotten by many and unrecognized by others, was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 359
awakened from his deep sleep and informed of the plight. “The
long drought that is afflicting the lands around Sheshi is
killing our animals one by one.”
Prefti Vlasi, with patches of white hair on each side of his
head, unshaven and with the skin below his eyelashes inching up
to his eyes, lifted himself from the chair and searched deeply
into the past, trying to recall the faces of those who stood
before him. As soon as he was able to collect his thoughts, he
asked for the year and the day. “It is the thirteenth of June,”
said the youngest in the group. “Saint Anthony,” thought Prefti
Vlasi, “the day of the distribution of bread.”
The eldest in the group relived the secular mistrust of their
grandparents toward the priest. They recalled Prefti Vlasi’s
ringing the church bells himself in an effort to silence the
leftist politicians who denounced the Church and who even denied
the existence of the Maker. “Those who tell you that God does
not exist are the messengers of the Devil,” he muttered during
Mass on Sunday. Little did Prefti Vlasi know, at that time, that
soon after, he himself would come to doubt his calling. Indeed,
he began to think that, between those who preached an end to the
injustices in the world and his own efforts to save souls with a
drop of salted water and the sign of the cross, there was
essentially very little difference.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 360
While Prefti Vlasi and the village politicians were busy
blaming each other for the continued drought, the fields were
quickly turning into desert. Driti took advantage of the
coolness of the night to search for the sound of water
underneath the seven mountains. He gave the news of the find the
following Sunday as Prefti Vlasi celebrated Mass. He was the
only man attending the service among the restless children and
the sad-faced elderly women, the latter more concerned,
presumably, of the coming uncertainties than of the mystical
union with God. Prefti Vlasi learned of the finding of water as
he raised the holy cup and noticed a halo of white doves gently
encircling Driti, who seemed to be lifted from the marble
pavement. The priest hastened to end the Mass. He could not take
his eyes from the young man whose halo brightened the church
with the glow of a thousand burning candles.
After Mass, Prefti Vlasi and Driti walked together to the
fountain in the main square. They washed their hands and took a
sop of the cold water flowing freely from the mouth of the
gargoyle. The old men sitting on the bench on the other side of
the square witnessed the event and attempted with their canes to
call the attention of those present who had turned their backs
to spite the priest as he walked past them. This gesture,
performed every Sunday by all the men amassed near the almond
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 361
trees, caused Prefti Vlasi to grind his teeth and curse in
Latin.
The women coming out of the church took the first street out of
the square to return home. It was the time of day at which the
stomach pain took hold of the priest. That pain would not leave
him until he sat down on his balcony to savor a cup of green
tea. The village’s lines and the evening colors softened his
bitterness and alleviated his loneliness. He often thought of
his childhood and the early days of his priesthood. He did not
know then that he was to end in a place where the childhood
dreams withered away with the changes in the seasons. “If I
could only go back to that place, if only for awhile, and
breathe in the scent of the roses.” The lazy noise of the empty
cup of tea on the small table brought Prefti Vlasi abruptly back
to the hour of six. The evening had the wings of winter in them.
Thinking that it soon would be cold, the priest took a glance at
the pile of wood on the far end of the balcony and noted that
there was very little left. Just a few stumps and a little
kindling. “Maybe this will be the last winter,” he murmured,
feeling a strange sense of relaxation throughout his body. He
fell asleep with the never-ending dream of his sister on her way
to see him.
The custodian of the Chapel of the Virgin of Constantinople was
found dead by the shepherds bringing down their flock of sheep
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 362
from the heights of the seven mountains. His wide-open eyes
faced East. When the authorities rushed to bury him, they only
found blue rocks in the shape of a circle and, in the middle,
the shoot of a pomegranate tree. For as long as the people of
Sheshi could remember, it flowered with every season and the
blue rocks always retained a bit of the blue of the sky.
The waitress had brought me a second cup of coffee. It was
bitter. She was tall, rather thin, and had a face set atop a
long neck. She moved from table to table with precise, assured
gestures. The image of the girl at the end of the table in the
library had made her way into the coffee shop. I wondered if the
waitress were able to see the two of us sitting in front of the
wide window. The burned coffee left an acrid taste in my mouth.
On both sides of the counter uniformed bodies with symmetrical
heads bent over the cups filled and refilled. From their eyes,
yellow puss flowed, smelling of old in the new. I took care of
the bill with the usual tip. I glanced outside hoping to glimpse
the girl from the library on her way to the subway station. “The
library will close in ten minutes, and I will follow her to the
subway entrance,” I speculated. The library was no more than a
five-minute walk from the café. I had measured the distance many
times before. At the table next to the door of the coffee shop
sat an old couple with watery eyes and trembling fingers.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 363
Suddenly a pistol shot from across the street hit a man in the
back. His fingers still clung to the purse as he stumbled headfirst, almost reaching the entrance to the coffee shop. A pool
of blood trickling down from his wound made its way to the
street gutter. The officer, holstering his gun, pulled a plastic
bag from the inside pocket of his blue uniform and covered the
body entirely. The flow of cars moved on. A second and a third
officer lifted the bundle and placed it inside an unmarked black
van. The silence that had reigned just seconds before the fired
shots quickly resumed.
The coffee shop patrons continued to sip their coffee, but the
elderly couple sat closer together, wiping the excess water from
their eyes. The dim light in the street quickly enveloped the
passersby inside thick, transparent cubicles, making of them
mere shadows gasping for air amidst concave faces taking delight
in themselves.
The library had been closed for awhile. “Not even today will I
be able to see her.” I began to walk home. The stoops of the
tenement houses on Amsterdam Avenue were filled with people
playing dominos. They spoke their own language in front of the
dark brown brick facades with rectangular windows protected by
steel bars. After sunset they gathered their own dreams under
the cavalcading clouds and the watchful eyes of the blueuniformed men swinging their batons and scrutinizing each of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 364
players in search of accusations. But the play went on,
unperturbed, each group barely hiding their mutual mistrust. The
women sat close to their children.
The entrance to the subway station was just a few blocks ahead.
Black graffiti of ancient symbols covered the name of the
station. The wind was pushing the few leaves of the season
inside the tunnel. I sat on a broken bench next to another
passenger, his face covered by his coat collar. He seemed a mere
blackened leaf waiting to be swept away by the next burst of
wind descending onto the platform. I glanced down the tunnels on
each side of the station: deep fissures of darkness with white
specks floating at the very end. A strong, cold gust of wind
blew a heap of leaves down the stairs along with a page of an
old newspaper. Its white and black print announced industrial
growth in the double digits. The paper, blown by an even
stronger burst of wind, rolled over onto the train tracks, but
the man on the bench remained motionless. The headlines on the
newspaper had channeled his thoughts into the dark of the
tunnel, where the white speck of light grew in size, announcing
the arrival of the train. As I approached the open door, I
looked back at the man, expressionless and glued to the bench.
The light in the subway car flickered. Across from me a welldressed woman of indeterminate age wore a flowery hat and
burning red lipstick. She moved her eyes from one end of the car
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 365
to the other. Between each of the passengers, vast spaces of
loneliness erected walls of silences. Light and dark colors
fused to create islands of sands lacerated by the high waves of
the ocean. The train squealed over the worn tracks, engulfing
every other sound inside the steel box. I sought the warmth of
my coat just as I had sought the warmth of our hearth the night
before our departure from Sheshi to the city of the illuminated
tall ships.
“We had sat around the last burning olive stump without saying
a word, heedless of the warnings of those who had left Sheshi
before us, only to return heartbroken through unending swamps
and unmarked deserts. The desire to unite with the other half of
the family and to escape the long days of winter had brushed
away the apprehension of not knowing what awaited us at the end
of the long journey. The line of the people in front of the tall
ship revealed the same fearful faces. Attempting to hide their
trepidation, the travelers clung steadfastly to their luggage
wrapped with ropes.”
The subway train shot like a bullet into the emptiness of the
tunnel, trembling as it passed through each station, deserted
but for one or two homeless people claiming temporary ownership
of the benches. Only three passengers remained as the train made
its way onto the elevated tracks. The city below appeared lazy
under a canopy of dark clouds which brought closer together the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 366
few lights still shining in the gray haze of the horizon. The
cold had steadily solidified the few drops of rain on the glass
windows of the cars. The Jackson Avenue station was dipped in a
pool of loneliness. The street below the station was littered
with soda bottles, and a stagnant air made its way into the
alleys between the tenements. Not a light could be seen in any
of the homes set on this canvas of private depths weaving
indifference. Yet, 506 Jackson Avenue shone brightly into the
mirror of the lamppost. Although the steps to its entrance, like
all the others on that block, evinced no memories of past years.
The stoniness of the air had even turned the few trees that
lined the street into sculptured icicles.
Sunday came full of promises. The people on the avenue, dressed
in their best apparel, waited patiently for a cloudless sky so
that they might talk over the events of the week with someone
else. Others wandered through the main path of Saint Mary’s Park
until they found their eyes fixed on the swings full of children
sharing flight with the black crows above. The day came to an
end when the last beam of sunlight faded into the spreading
night. In just six days, the ritual began again with only a few
inconsequential variants that posed no threat to the only day of
the week in which time and memories embraced as they waited for
the first days of the coming season. The days and the months
that followed unperceived by anyone gnawed fervently at past
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 367
memories like the waves of a stormy day crashing against the
shores and leaving behind bits of orphaned shells.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 368
Chapter Eight
The monthly letters from Sheshi had ceased to reach the house
on Jackson Avenue. The bridge that brought together the depths
of the sacred cave and the dreamless reality of the tenement
house had all but vanished. Each letter had been read aloud as
we all gathered at the dinner table. Each had begun with the
same revelation: “The swallows this year were fewer than in
previous years.” But the last letter had spoken of many a bad
omen.
“Difficult times are awaiting us. Our boys have been leaving
for the North like herds of sheep, and the fields are yielding
only weeds. The women no longer sit outside their homes waiting
for their men to return; some have been seen late at night
howling like wolves in search of food. People swear to have seen
these women change into unrecognizable beasts rushing wildly
toward the entrance to the sacred cave. Each door is locked with
the arrival of the first dark streaks of the night. The elders
have been saying that this year’s wine will turn into vinegar,
and that the oil from the dark olives will not shed its drops of
water. The few women who attend Mass on Sunday have seen rats
scurrying between the wooden benches. Prefti Vlasi no longer
walks through the main square, and many have even forgotten what
he looks like. The woman who cleans his house told her neighbors
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 369
that the priest is awaiting the arrival of his sister from the
road that sees the first rays of light.”
“ In a short while, no one will remember Sheshi the way our
forefathers
conceived it when they first arrived from the salty
seas carrying on their shoulder the icon of the Virgin of
Constantinople,” Mother had said when she asked Sister to
sprinkle the letter with holy water and place it with the others
inside the chestnut box. Mother had guarded those letters,
linking the present with the past, like ashes inside a sacred
urn. “The breath of our people is inside those letters. The
sighs the words guard will keep your blood moving as it has done
for all of those who took the long journey from the Bora
Mountains of the Caucus to Sheshi.”
Not too much later, Mother’s fears threatened to come true.
Each member of the family followed his own road. The one who
remained at home more determined than ever to fight the everthreatening changes assailing the neighborhood was Sister. Her
nightly conversations with Mother as she stared at the empty
chair next to the kitchen window grew in frequency. She no
longer looked at the lamppost as she had done for years. With
iron conviction, she erased the image from her mind and placed a
thick curtain on the window overlooking the street. Now she kept
her own watch, dividing the day among the many chores she
executed with the precision of the evening shade that never
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 370
failed to come to the kitchen window. Only the streaks of white
hair on each side of her head indicated the passing of time. The
black dress she wore had become an intimate part of her as she
assumed the semblance of Mother.
By this time, Darius, the youngest of the family, had breached
the enclosed world of our sister. He had become an expert
machinist, awed by the countless pieces that worked in unison
inside a machine. The walls in his room were filled with
mechanical designs connected to one another by alternating
colors of red and black. “One of these days,” he would say, “I
will design a machine that breathes in contaminated air and
exhales air as pure as that I used to inhale down the ravine in
old Sheshi.” This endeavor had become his obsession. At times he
awakened during the night to add a line or two to the design.
The room soon filled with pile upon pile of pictures of machines
taken from all the magazines Darius could fine. He devised his
own mathematical formula for creating a certain harmony between
the impure air, the steel pieces and the release of invisible
energy. In his room, he spoke his own language, one that sounded
like that which grandmother had spoken as we sat around her
fireplace in the house on the lower edge of Sheshi.
The dedication and conviction in Darius’ work left no room for
questions. The years galloped by, leaving only traces of deep
wrinkles in his forehead and an expression of sadness that he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 371
was never to shed. Mother had been the first to notice the
hidden face of melancholy that he tried to bury among the
mechanical designs. “Your brother was born on a sad day,” she
reminded Sister. “The road he has to traverse will not be a
happy one. Keep an eye on him. Put signs in the corridors that
will direct him home.” As always, Mother had seen far more
clearly than anyone else what lay ahead. Her power to visualize
what was taking place in the present that would emerge in the
future with uncanny accuracy shocked all the women on her
grandmother’s side of the family and inflicted much fear in
everyone in Sheshi. “He has inherited the runaway imagination of
your grandfather, and in this land, it will be his undoing.”
It took Darius only a few months to rebel against the rigid
school code which provided no answers to his questions. “Where
you put me is not a place to keep busy. I cannot even turn my
pen the way I want,” he complained when he got home, fighting to
hold back the tears that wanted to course freely down his
cheeks. “The others don’t know it, but the fierce eyes of the
teachers intend to make us become silent sheep.”
What Darius most missed were the unending wheat fields dancing
in the wind and the wild oregano plants that carpeted the seven
mountains at their lower level. His eyes waited to fetch every
white cloud that floated by his accustomed place in front of our
house. There, surrounded by four walls shattered by a stray bomb
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 372
during the war, he had planted every seed he could find and
waited for the wind to bring closer the cloud that would water
them with a few drops of rain. “I hear a woman crying
endlessly,” he often confided to Mother, “just as the sun begins
to hide behind the mountain.”
Darius’ seeds grew where once stood the one-room house of the
ageless widow who had been heard calling for her husband until
her last breath. He had gone with his regiment to the fardistant fields of Russia. “He is only waiting for the snows to
melt so that he can find the road back to the land that smells
of violets,” the widow told the people of Sheshi until they no
longer believed her. The young in the square changed faces as
the wooden benches decayed under the snows and rains of winter,
but the widow never lost hope for the return of her husband. She
gave Darius a pomegranate seed she had saved and kept warm
inside a blue bottle which she kept on top of her fireplace.
“Plant this seed in your garden,” she directed, “and when it
grows, you will tell my husband where to find me.”
Darius had planted the seed the day she died. On that day, the
widow had cleaned the house and had fed each of her domestic
animals. The seed did not sprout until the first remains of the
one hundred blue soldiers began to arrive at the train station
of Sheshi. That was in early May. The day dawned with a cold
breeze. The cold had delayed the blooming of the fruit trees by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 373
three weeks. In the village, no one had gone to the fields and
the shops had been ordered closed by the Mayor. The square stood
still. The water from the fountain seemed to flow noiselessly.
The young and the old mingled with some strangers who had come
from the nearby villages. They were all there to receive small
boxes with the remains of the blue soldiers from the killing
fields of the Russian steppes. The elderly women gathered on
both sides of the fountain while the men, holding onto their
canes, stood in silence in front of the café. All waited for the
officials to begin the march towards the train station. They had
been told that the boxes carried no names, only numbers, and
that the bones were incomplete and intertwined with roots. “They
are the bones of your sons, brothers and husbands, and so the
grief is for all of us to share,” exclaimed the Mayor, dressed
in black for the occasion. Those were the only words he spoke.
Prefti Vlasi, touched by the events, awoke from his deep sleep
to follow behind the tricolor flag carried by one of the
soldiers. The balconies and windows were covered with black
sheets. The men and women fell into line behind the town’s
officials.
A steady drizzle had begun to fall on the procession
accompanied by patches of fog that had begun to descend from the
seven mountains late in the morning. The line of mourners melted
slowly in the gray mist of the heights. Someone in the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 374
procession had ventured to suggest delaying the digging of the
graves until the earth softened a bit, but another, who barely
kept pace with the rest, spoke against the delay. “Those bones
have traveled too many miles to be waiting for burial. Their
torture must end today.”
In fact, the gathering of the remains at the train station
lasted for months. Spring had departed with no memories left
behind. The wheat fields filled with red poppies were not
celebrated by anyone. It took all of the able-bodied of Sheshi
to carry the one hundred boxes to the cemetery. The remains were
distributed to the proper relatives according to the dreams they
had had. Yet many of the boxes remained unclaimed. Photographs
of the missing soldiers were placed on the remains with the hope
of getting some response from the bits of bones, but to no
avail. It was finally decided by Prefti Vlasi and the Mayor of
Sheshi that only the very young should take the remaining boxes
to the community burial ground. The next day, with all the
adults behind closed doors and the young ones dressed in white,
the procession to the cemetery began.
It took three days and three nights for the burning candles to
dispel the dark clouds filled with cries hovering over Sheshi.
As for the smell of death emanating from the boxes already
growing mushrooms from their fissures, it was never more to
leave the village. It served as a constant reminder to the old
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 375
and young of what awaited everyone. To those who had been
fortunate enough to identify the remains, the odor caused
unending hallucinations. Lines of ragged soldiers with missing
limbs, their feet sinking in deep snow, not knowing which way to
go and, perhaps, hoping for that stray bullet that would put an
end to their misery, appeared whenever these relatives closed
their eyes.
The most touching delusion was related by Prefti Vlasi during
the usual Sunday sermon delivered to the few elderly women
attending Mass. He swore as he lifted the Holy Eucharist that he
had seen the Son of God wandering through the village’s streets
and knocking on every door in search of shelter. “He has come to
us and we failed to recognize Him,” Prefti Vlasi announced to
the few faithful present. His powerful voice reached all those
in the square and in the café, who moved closer to the Church of
the Dead to listen to the fiery words of the priest. “He has
come to deliver to us the bones of your husbands, brothers and
sons and to remind us of the futility of all wars.” What amazed
the crowd in the square were not so much the delivery of the
sermon but the changes they noticed in the prelate’s face as he
silently walked past them after Mass. Years later they would
continue to swear that, on that day, they had seen the face of
Christ on Prefti Vlasi. The radiant look in his eyes took them
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 376
back to the sacred icons they had seen on the day of their first
communion.
The smell of putrid air given off by the mushrooms that had
been growing everywhere in Sheshi suddenly came to an end with
the appearance of the first blue violets. The decayed mushrooms
turned into a white powder quickly dispersed by the soft
whistling winds coming from the north shore of Africa. Once
again each family in Sheshi went back to its usual spring
routine. Homes were turned inside out, flower vases were
stripped of the winter mold, and the vegetable gardens were
plowed and blanketed with compost. The girls busied themselves
with their dowry, and the young men flocked to the main square
dressed and perfumed with their best. The boxes with the remains
of the dead soldiers were forgotten in the communal burial
grounds as something that had happened beyond the realm of
memories.
It was at this time that Darius had learned the secret of the
seeds. He vowed not to share that knowledge with anyone who did
not wish to remember the remains of those who had gone to the
Great War and who had come back with only their bones inside the
wooden boxes. The clock on the municipal building of Sheshi was
playing its usual tricks without allowing the people to see the
effect it was having on them when the town crier announced the
first killing. It occurred in one of those narrow streets that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 377
seemed to have been forgotten by the young and old alike because
they remained outside the main square and had the strange smell
of old things. It was early spring, the people of Sheshi
remembered. The cherry trees were in full bloom with so many
flowers that not even the branches could hold them. At first,
the promising flowers brought smiles to the elders who readied
themselves to move to the stone seats outside their homes for
story telling. But, as the days went by, the flowers started to
turn brighter than the rays of the sun at midday. The intense
light blinded anyone who dared to look at the cherry trees. The
nights had turned brighter than the days. For the young who
needed to be close to their loved ones, the hours seemed like
weeks and the weeks seemed like years. At night, the café
quickly turned into an open confessional booth. The secrets of
their beloved, so carefully stored in the arcane recesses of
their minds for months and years, became public information.
That very night, Ramadin, Darius’ best friend, had put on his
best suit, saved for his future wedding to the girl with the
greenest eyes of all the people in Sheshi. Those who saw him
walk up the hill from the old square with the church of Shën
Koli would never forget the cloud of cicadas passing over the
village. The noise deafened all those who ventured outside their
homes. The only one who remained impervious to the noise was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 378
Ramadin himself. His mind had already entered the blue house of
Emira, aided by the candle flame in her front window.
Ramadin slowed his pace as he approached her house. He looked
all around to make certain that no one else was present before
stopping below Emira’s window. The pounding of his heart
produced a cold sweat that rushed from his forehead down his
face. Taking out his embroidered handkerchief and slowly wiping
the sweat from his eyes, Ramadin could see that the candle had
gone out and the window pane had turned pitch dark. He quickened
his pace, hoping to see Emira at the Fountain of the Three Roads
where she usually went to fetch water for the evening meal. It
was not to be. The fountain on that day had been shut down
because of the low pressure from the reservoir on top of the
train station.
The days that followed were the hottest ever felt in Sheshi.
The cherry blossoms withered, leaving the branches scarred. The
land quickly turned into a desert with deep crevices. The
streets were empty of people. Here and there, stray dogs
stretched out looking for coolness on the dark blue stones in
the secluded alleys. Swarms of dark horseflies swirled around
the bits of fresh garbage left outside the homes. Ramadin could
not recall ever feeling such silence. It felt as if Sheshi had
been emptied of people, leaving it to the mercy of the flies and
ants.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 379
“The air smelled as it had the day the men of the village, all
in black uniforms, were taken to the train station by the Mayor.
On that day I stayed at home taking care of the mule. I remember
I had been told to change the bandage on the wound on the mule’s
knee every hour.” Ramadin’s father had told him to chop lard and
add a bit of salt to it. It was the last time that Ramadin was
to hear his father’s voice. He had never dared to look at his
father when he spoke to him. His mere presence filled him with
fear.
That morning Ramadin sensed a strange feeling he could not
pinpoint. A sensation of total calm had spread within him,
leaving him utterly detached from his surroundings.
Inexplicably, Ramadin decided to put on the suit and white shirt
his mother had put away for when he decided to wed. He cleaned
and polished the dark boots with a piece of charcoal from the
fireplace. The pain he had felt deep in his belly button during
the night had become more pronounced. He changed the pillow case
from his sweat-soaked bed linens which smelled of the unrequited
desire to be with Emira. The morning sun shone brightly as
Ramadin walked on heavy legs toward the old square. Shën Koli
stood between the shade and the blinding sunlight. The sun above
the old square was a fireball of invisible clouds shooting down
wave after wave of burning rays. He took out his embroidered
white handkerchief and placed it around his neck, this time to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 380
protect his shirt collar from the sweat dripping down his
cheeks. The window panes of Emira’s room blinded his eyes. It
must have been, by now, late in the afternoon when the sun shone
the brightest. “I will wash my hands at the fountain and I will
wait for the sun to go down,” Ramadin resolved, not daring to
show any sign of anxiety to whoever could be watching him from
behind the doors.
Ramadin noticed that the fountain was going dry and that signs
of corrosion had begun to appear around the metal tubing. “How
could the fountain have deteriorated?” he wanted to ask, but the
thought of Emira did not allow him to pursue that concern. The
heat had turned the stone on the fountain into an oven.
Intertwined rays in the shape of a halo had settled over the old
church. The evaporating fumes from the walls of the houses had
reduced the hanging begonias to dust. By now, Ramadin was having
trouble breathing. As he struggled to catch a satisfyingly deep
breath, he looked for a shady place from which to watch the
seven mountains leaning on one another. He needed a place to
sit, for his legs had become as heavy as the logs he carried
down the mountains with his father.
The previous night Ramadin had dreamt that a tree trunk had
fallen on his chest, crushing his lungs. Because he no longer
dared to close his eyes, he had fixed them on the cracks of the
window awaiting the first light of dawn. Unbeknownst to him,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 381
Ramadin’s mother had also gone through a bad night. She did not
share her dream, thinking that it was a woman’s matter. But she
did place her hand on her breasts to ascertain that the echo she
had always felt as a young girl was still audible to her failing
sense of hearing. She remembered that her echo had failed only
once before. It had happened after she had given birth to
Ramadin. Fear had forced her to take her newborn to the greatmother at the end of the village near the Cave of the Serpent.
“You must get your milk back and place it on his lips so that
he can find his place among the living,” she had been told as
she had prepared to leave. But a second warning froze her at the
door step. “From now on you must face the forces of
forgetfulness that have been snatching our young ones from the
village.” The poor woman had spent the rest of her life trying
to prevent her son from following in the footsteps of the
others. But on the day of the procession to the train station to
gather the boxes with the remains of the soldiers, the mother
had taken the liberty of turning her mind away from her mission.
At that very moment, her brief concern for the soldiers in blue
uniforms set in motion the events that were to lead to the loss
of her own son. What awaited her was a cycle of time woven in
guilt that would gnaw at her until the last moment of her life.
Ramadin, soaked in sweat, reached the café in the square of the
main fountain. He looked for an empty seat outside. “He looked
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 382
like a frightened stray dog trying to avoid being chased away,”
the others would remember years later. The few almond trees in
the square that had weathered the cold winter were immersed in
loneliness. The swallows had failed to return from the African
shores, but Ramadin paid no attention to the absence of the
birds. The blue stones carpeting the square seemed to be making
knots with the sun rays bouncing back and forth in the mirrors
of the water gushing out of the mouths of the gargoyles of the
old fountain. The weather-beaten door of the Church of the Dead
had been closed as if forever. The cats that generally stretched
to the intense heat of the day on the steps of the church were
not to be seen.
Seated alone outside the café, Ramadin had the feeling that
something strange was lurking in the square. His right hand
quivered uncontrollably. On the right side of the church, he saw
Vlasë returning along the winding brook from his vegetable
garden.
Vlasë was the first to rise in the village. While
everyone else in Sheshi was still between the night and the rise
of the sun from the lowest of the seven mountains, Vlasë had
already tended to the tender shoots of his plants.
From a distance, Vlasë and Ramadin exchanged an uncertain
greeting with a slow movement of their right hands. Ramadin was
convinced during that exchange that he detected a helpless
feeling of sadness in Vlasë’s hazy gray eyes. They looked at
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 383
each other one last time as Vlasë turned to face the narrow
street of his home. A sudden pain in Ramadin’s abdomen had begun
to blur his vision. Around him, darkness was descending. The
familiar corners of the square had vanished. Blood gushed from
his neck, creating a pool in front of his chair. He fell over
head first, drawing his last breath in his own blood, his wideopen eyes laden with fear.
“I did not see from where the shot had been fired,” Rina told
the authorities. “I was sitting mending my husband’s woolen
socks behind the balcony with the door ajar when I caught sight
of Ramadin falling into the pool of blood. I did see Vlasë near
the Church of the Dead raising his hand to greet Ramadin. The
shot must have been fired when I leaned over to pick up the
needle that had fallen. I tell you, I did not see anyone else in
the square. I tried to open the door to the balcony but my arms
had melted. I did see Ramadin trying to lift himself up, but his
body fell back again like a cat curling next to the fireplace.”
On Vlasë’s street, the few people who had not gone to the train
station swore, when asked, to have seen Vlasë wipe the tears
from his eyes with the right sleeve of his shirt. The exact time
at which the neighbors saw Vlasë could not be verified since,
had they possessed a clock, they would have been unable to read
it. “It was just before the sun stretched its wings on top of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 384
the red clay hill. We had just finished hanging the tomatoes on
the front wall of our homes,” they had said.
Vlasë lived by himself in the last house of the ravine. It was
a dwelling half cave and half volcanic stones that he had
collected and chiseled with the greatest care. It was the place
his great-grandfather had initially carved from the mountain and
for which his own father had built the first fireplace. Vlasë
still felt their presence and still nourished their memories.
How long ago that was, Vlasë could not tell. But he had seen
many sunrises and many moons appear over his house. He suspected
that the house must have been carved before the village was
called Sheshi and much before he had decided never to speak
again.
Late that evening, the authorities did descend to the bottom of
the village with the hope of getting some answers to their
questions concerning Ramadin’s death. By the time they got
there, the setting sun had been replaced by a full moon. The
sudden appearance of the moonlight from behind the dark blue
clouds made their descent much easier. To the Mayor it was
impossible to believe that Vlasë could have been responsible,
but he had to follow every lead to get to the bottom of the
killing. What disturbed him the most was the timing. “How could
they have killed Ramadin on the day they were collecting the
boxes with the remains of the soldiers amidst the silence of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 385
early afternoon?” the Mayor mumbled to himself even as he
approached Vlasë’s home.
The Mayor found Vlasi seated on the stone stool in front of his
house. For the Mayor and the lawman, Vlasë had but one answer,
which he gave with a stutter, due to his long-standing habit of
silence. “I saw death in his eyes the minute I saw him in front
of the café. Later on, I smelled the dead body left to decay,
and I knew that Ramadin had gone to the other side of the brook
where the wheat fields never cease to dance with the wind. I had
waved at him with my right hand, for with the other I was
carrying the few red tomatoes I had gathered from the vegetable
garden. I did that, feeling very sad inside of me, just the way
I felt when I had to bury the ashes of my own son, killed in the
deep snows of the country that has neither beginning nor end. At
least, that is how Prefti Vlasi explained it to me after the
service at the Church of the Dead.” The Mayor saw no reason to
ask Vlasë any more questions.
Ramadin’s body was wrapped in a white sheet and fresh violets
were sprinkled over it. Placed on top of the kitchen table, it
took three days for everyone to view. Emira did not shed one
tear. She pulled the rocking chair that had been in the family
for so long up next to the window that overlooked the street.
Those who passed by saw her face change from that of an angel to
that of an old fairy with white, disheveled hair. The memory of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 386
Ramadin and Emira remained forever fixed in the mind of the
people of Sheshi. The elders stated that their presence would be
felt for as long as the fountain would bring water from the
depths of the seven mountains. And, indeed, the last letter we
received from the village did mention that plans had been
approved to restore every fountain to life.
The only newspaper stand at the corner of Jackson Avenue and
One Hundred and Forty-Ninth Street was surrounded by curious
onlookers. The Indian attendant from Madras watched them
carefully as they glanced at the headlines. “Mass killings in a
rice field.” Photographs showed naked children overcome by fear.
An elderly woman, her hands reaching to the sky, appeared to me
unmoved by the scene on the roadside, while, in the distance, a
long line of people followed one another in procession. This was
the photograph which was to divide the neighborhood. A few from
the high offices gloated over the conflict. The rest anxiously
waited for a prompt resolution to a war about which they knew
very little. The pain of the terrorized naked children was being
swallowed quickly by the stream of automobiles moving along the
main avenue. Tempers flared from the college campus to the
streets, pitting the youth, carrying peace signs, against the
old, puffed up with fake arrogance.
That same afternoon the mailman personally delivered a letter
to Darius. Because it was truly addressed to him, the heavy
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 387
envelope caught everyone’s attention, but it revealed nothing of
the contents which were to change the family for years to come.
Darius was summoned to report to the main army center of the
city the very next day. The envelope even held a copper subway
token. I read the letter over and over again, as if trying to
find a word that could shed some doubt upon its main demand. The
expression of sorrow in our sister’s face spoke of terrible
things to come. Saying nothing, she rose to find the old ropebound suitcase which Father had brought from the village. Sister
spent the remaining hours of the night washing and ironing
Darius’ few belongings. She also tucked in a picture of each
family member, which she had sewn into a cloth pocket sprinkled
with a few pellets of moth balls. She cautioned Darius to keep
them in a safe place. “We will be there for you during the long,
rainy days that bring out the loneliness in a person.”
“How far away is this place where he is being sent with the
rest of the young men we have been seeing on the television?”
she asked me. “It is in the direction from where the sun rises
in the early hours of the morning,” I replied. I could tell by
her looks that she was not convinced by the answer. “Can he walk
away from the futility of death?” she queried. “Distances and
the fear of death disappear when memories are strong,” I
reassured, but Sister’s good sense and her instinct for
protecting the family were sturdier than any feeble explanation.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 388
“The pictures I have sewn into his left pocket will help him
find his way back home if he tires of the war,” she said to
herself.
The next morning, pushing against a cold wind, we accompanied
Darius to the train station where Jackson Avenue met the tall
buildings of the projects. The station was deserted. The rush
hour had passed, and the neighborhood had already fallen into
its daily slumber. “We will be waiting for your return,” Sister
told Darius as the train approached from the North side of the
city. “I’ll be back after I see what the world looks like on the
other side of the neighborhood,” he said in fear and wonder.
Those were the last words we were to hear from him for months.
Sister waited anxiously for the first letter to arrive. The
humid summer days seemed to linger longer than usual.
Autumn had not yet made its presence known upon the leaves of
St. Mary’s Park when a rain storm hit and we awoke to a cold
morning. The rain quickly turned into ice crashing against the
window panes. The steps of the tenement home had been emptied
for the season. The women had retired to places behind the
window glass, where they continued waiting for their loved ones
to return. An air of seclusion nestled over the rooftops and
dark clouds cloaked every building on Jackson Avenue. This time,
the silence of long ago had made its way into the house,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 389
determined to lodge there forever. Through the night, it turned
into a visible shadow feeding on the moonlight.
Weeks later, with a distant smile upon her face, Sister
announced the imminent arrival of a letter. “Buy some potting
soil,” she directed me. “The herbs on the window sill need to be
replenished.” A few days later, a letter did arrive. The postman
confessed to the difficulty he had had in finding the street
written in large letters on the envelope. “I had to find an
opening through the iron fence to deliver the letter,” he
complained as he cleared the dust from his light blue uniform.
“I asked the few people wandering in the street where 506 was,
but no one remembered.”
In fact, our tenement was the only one still standing between
One Hundred Forty-ninth Street and Jackson Avenue. The others
had disappeared under piles of bricks and decayed wood. I saw
the changes coming as fast as the northern clouds that made
their appearance at the end of summer. I tried to give an
account to Sister, who had completely stopped venturing out
since Darius’ departure for the distant war. Time had taken hold
of everyone in the neighborhood and was determined to erase as
many old memories as possible in order to make room for the new
waves of people who had settled on the east side of St. Mary’s
Park. “I don’t need to go out to see what is going on,” she
answered as I attempted to keep her informed of the changes. “I
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 390
prefer to breathe the same air we breathed together when we came
here from Sheshi.”
Bent upon keeping alive every single detail of our journey
from the village to the city, Sister had stubbornly refused to
acknowledge the havoc of time right outside the window of her
room. To preserve the echoes and the odor of her herbs, she
sealed every opening, converting the apartment into an enclosed
cage. The thick walls, laden with memories which nourished one
another, excluded the events of the street. The postman noted an
odd sensation; as he climbed them, the piles of bricks had
seemed to multiply the closer he came to the entrance of the
tenement. “I only stopped to catch my breath and to see what was
ahead of me, while the sky got darker and darker behind me,” he
said as he searched for the letter inside his leather sack.
Although it was the last building standing, the owner to whom I
paid the rent at the end of the month refused to give the place
up to the city. “You’ll be staying there for as long as I live,”
he would tell me, his blue eyes hiding behind a gray veil. Not
long after, his health rapidly failing and his eyes ever more
clouded, he closed down his butcher shop on the main avenue and
admitted that the city was closer to succeeding in its scheme.
The disease afflicting him had turned the owner into a small
child with an innocent smile that inevitably made others respond
to him in kind. The last time I saw him, I could only recognize
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 391
his voice. His eyes were half-closed and colorless. He had been
placed in a wooden cradle in front of the window. “You’ll be
told when you have to vacate the apartment,” the elder son told
me in a tone that left no space for protest. I left the butcher
shop as the cradle began to shake violently. I could see the
eyes of the small creature bulging from their sockets and
opening long crevices in the large front window. Outside, the
sky had filled with dark clouds running on top of each other and
sending down sheets of rain.
“We have to find another place to live,” I told Sister. “I
already know we have to move. I was told in a dream as I held an
abandoned child. He was hungry, but I had no milk to give him in
my breasts and there were no mountains nearby to offer us wood
for the winter.” Sister was aging as fast as the seasons that
came and went without leaving anything to grasp. That night, the
storm having taken out the electricity, I read her the letter by
candlelight. It had been written weeks ago. In it, Darius spoke
of the rigorous training over beaches, forests and deserts. “I
am forbidden to ask anyone where we are to be sent, but I had
heard two bunk-mates in the lower tier say that we’re to be
shipped to a place where the rainy season never ends and where
villages are washed away,” he wrote at the bottom of the page.
Months later, the place many called Hell was on the front page
of every newspaper. The French had become stuck in the quicksand
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 392
and were waiting to be rescued. The newcomers had entered a
green labyrinth from which there was no exit. It had become a
terrible war. Infinite plastic bags holding the dead began to
arrive during the silence of the night. From every point of the
city, one could smell the presence of death. The sky was weaving
clouds and a windless atmosphere intensified the foul air,
keeping everyone at home. Windows were kept shut and all the
openings sealed to keep the smell out. Angry crowds gathered
daily in front of the government building, demanding the burial
of the plastic bags stacked on the city’s piers. The
demonstrators were met by an army of law enforcers who left
dozens of the protestors bleeding on the ground. The law
officers were joined by hundreds of construction workers, each
with a flag and a steel pipe; together, they attacked the
bearded students who questioned the country’s involvement in an
unjust war. The indiscriminate killing of the war and the
attacks on the demonstrators made their way into every home
through the television screen.
Marooned in our apartment, Sister grew concerned that Darius
would not be able to find his way home because of the changes
to the neighborhood. The place had become unrecognizable. The
elevated train at the end of Jackson Avenue stood much taller
than ever. Rebuilding would have to wait until the war came to
an end. But the war dragged on and the city itself grew
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 393
indifferent to the many deaths announced daily in the
newspapers and on the television. It wasn’t long before the
city lost count of all its dead soldiers coming back in plastic
bags. The cemetery on the northern edge of the city turned into
a year-long field of flowers.
Months went by with no further letters from Darius. At home,
Sister looked more and more like Mother. It seemed as if the
past had found its way into the realities of the present.
Events moved in a circle. They came and went with the same
urgency of yesteryears. Even the five-room apartment on Jackson
Avenue took on the look of our home in Sheshi. It was not long
before the changes crept into every corner.
On a cloudless morning of an indeterminate season, I found
myself sitting next to the fireplace in our home in Sheshi. I
had just turned the olive log to create a flame. The home
smelled of freshly-picked olives, much as the whole village did
in the last days of November. From the balcony, the sky was
filled with suspended white flakes glittering over the threads
of the moonlight peeking furtively from the dark clouds. The
crumbling wall in front of the house still faced the old clock
on the tower of the municipal building. The cracks over the
tallest part of the tower had not widened. The plants growing
on the retaining wall had not lost their indefinable scent. It
seemed as if time had stood still forever.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 394
Inside the house, the few pieces of furniture were dustless.
The line of copper pots hung over the kitchen cabinets shined
as they had since the day they were given to Mother and Father.
The rocking chair next to the balcony had retained all its
solitude. On the small table next to it, the crochet needles
eagerly waited to restart knitting. I was waiting for father’s
whistle from beneath the balcony; this was the signal to
prepare the evening meal. The first to arrive was his yellow
finch, who flew back into the cage which hung on the wall of
the balcony. The days were short or long, depending on the
season, and the activities in each home in Sheshi were
synchronized to the status of the growth of the plants in the
fields. Each person knew exactly what was to be done. The
inscrutable faces of the women of old in our home had grown in
silence and had come to occupy the invisible places. Their
world was as impenetrable as the thick walls that supported the
house.
There were six of us at that time in our home in Sheshi. The
youngest, Darius, had just been baptized. The wooden cradle had
been placed in the middle of the room. On the door, Mother had
hung a laurel wreath that would keep away the unborn children
who might otherwise snatch away her child. No one knew what the
evil children looked like nor where they dwelled, but Mother
cautioned “When you see the cradle rock by itself, you will
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 395
know that they are here.” Waiting for the cradle to move proved
endless. The women seated around the perimeter of the house
complained of the Prefti’s tardiness. Speaking softly in a
language familiar in sound but not in meaning, they
communicated so as not to be heard by the children present. I
lingered with the rest of the children on the front steps where
the sun had already warmed the stones. From inside the house,
the smell of frying dough was seeping into the street.
The first to arrive was Father. He kept the barber shop open
until midday. He came back clean-shaven and attired in the
white shirt which his sister had sent him in her monthly
package. The deep frown of sadness which his forehead usually
bore was not there on that day. It must have gone well at the
barber shop. At times, it took only a few customers to feed the
family. While he waited for them, Father paced back and forth
in the main square with his eyes fixed on the road that led to
the train station.
Watching him from the steps of the Church
of the Dead, I often felt as much pain and anxiety as he. The
loneliness that took over the square at midday was broken only
by the shrieks of the black swallows flying straight into the
pool of water at the base of the fountain. The seven mountains
grew taller as the sun moved above them marking the line of
descent.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 396
The baptism ended with the pouring of the Holy Water over the
head of the recent addition to the family. The women could not
stop commenting on Prefti Vlasi’s drunkenness. With the
approaching darkness, the festivities quickly came to an end.
One by one, the guests returned home to prepare for work in the
fields the next morning.
From below the ravines, the winds were gathering strength
deep within the crevices. The time had come for the people of
the village to plug their ears with cotton balls to protect
themselves from the piercing howls of the wind. That year, the
winds lasted longer than usual. Soon after, dark clouds arrived
from where the sun rises, cooling the air during the day and
freezing it at night. The olive trees began to lose their
leaves and, unprotected, the green olives dropped one by one.
The elderly in Sheshi were at a loss to explain what was
happening, for no one could remember anything like it in the
past. Some attempted to chant the almost-forgotten songs to
induce dreams that could dig deep into their memories. It was
all in vain. An army of black swallows darkened the sky for
weeks, and the olive trees were stripped bare. Whole families
began to take the road that led to the train station. Soon
after, without hesitation, Father closed the barber shop. He
padlocked the door with the lock that had belonged to his
great-grandfather. Later, Sister would never fail to polish a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 397
replica of the lock with white vinegar and to replace it safely
inside the chestnut box on Jackson Avenue.
The only place that remained open in Sheshi was the café in
the main square. The place became an open confessional. There
people disclosed their plans for leaving the village and
received advice from those who had seen the outside world. The
light in the café shone until early dawn when the door was
locked and the square was left to the stray dogs and wandering
cats. “If we are to survive the coming winter, I must reach my
sister across the ocean.” Father uttered those words as we all
sat around the fireplace. The last log was burning slowly,
giving out just enough heat to make us almost feel its warmth.
Early the next morning, we all watched Father fill a small sack
with dried figs, a bottle of olive oil and a handful of
chestnuts that Mother kept fresh inside a barrel filled with
soil. Father traveled on foot for two days to reach the public
notary in the town with the hunting castle. “Tell my sister,”
he directed, “that I must leave the village with my two oldest
children so that the rest can go on living. Say also that it is
not my intention to leave our parents all alone in the
cemetery. As you well know, I have kept vigil over them for
years and no one in Sheshi can reprimand me.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 398
“Master Dunati, you are doing what many of us will have to do
one day and what many others have done before us,” replied the
public notary.
Thereupon, an uneasiness settled over our home as Father
waited for the letter to come from across the ocean. Winter had
arrived early and seemed in no hurry to leave. In the village
the people suffered in silence, putting all their hopes on
better times to come. Some prayed for an early spring and an
abundant wheat harvest that would keep the young men busy at
least until the end of June. But the young were like birds in a
nest waiting for their wings to grow stronger and longer. It
was the loss of the young ones that filled the elders with a
pain they never dared to mention.
The cold nights gave way to a dense fog that enveloped each
home and detached the villagers from one another. Mother had
put away the remaining candles for future days. The only source
of light was the faint flame in the fireplace. Darkness, a
constant presence in our home, erected even thicker walls than
the fog outside. Mother and Father exchanged very few words.
The pile of wood was almost gone. The heavy snows in the
mountains had prevented a distant uncle named Udhë from
replenishing the logs. Uncle Udhë lived in a village on the
other side of the seven mountains. He had come back from across
the ocean with a small fortune and had bought a parcel of land
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 399
at the edge of town. The war quickly gnawed at his estate. The
government took over his precious woods, leaving him nothing
but dead trees to harvest. Uncle Udhë felt cheated twice by the
people in power and spent the rest of his youthful years trying
to find his way back to the lands across the ocean. “It is only
a matter of time before I leave,” he told the few people who
sat with him on the steps of the old stone church, waiting for
the sun to hide behind the chain of mountains. In the end, he
sat alone as the years went by, dreaming of the land where work
abounded and the table was always covered with food and one
could wipe the sweat from his brow with satisfaction. “Here,
there is no future. You become a slave as soon as you open your
eyes, and when you die, there may not even be anyone to close
them for you.”
His in-dwelling bitterness blazed from his bulging eyes as
he crossed the snowy mountain chain. Like all the others, he
had stood in line in the city below the volcano and had dreamt
of better days to come. With time, nostalgia for his village
had gotten the best of him. He had returned, unaware of the
vast tracts of land being ploughed to bury dead soldiers. The
annual trip he took across the mountains to sell the wood in
Sheshi fetched him a gallon of olive oil and a sack of
chestnuts. The color of the sky and the sweetness of the air
told him when to take the trip back to his village. He knew
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 400
which path to take and which slopes to avoid better than any
one else. The years he had spent in the land across the ocean
had given him the confidence that was lacking in the others.
“He has the strength of our ancient gods,” murmured those who
saw him climbing towards the seven mountains. Udhë had retuned
to his village after a long voyage with a whole list of changes
that would improve the lives of the people. But, as the months
and the years went by, Udhë’s long list of prospects was slowly
forgotten. When he did reconsider them, he himself could not
make any sense out of them because they were in contradiction
with the surroundings.
Time began to play tricks on Udhë. Only a few images of the
land across the ocean remained alive. He saw them clearly when
he closed his eyes in the fulness of the night. “I don’t even
share those memories with your sister,” Udhë told Father as
they cracked a few roasted chestnuts and savored a glass of
wine next to the fireplace. “Your sister is convinced that the
body and mind have to work together, for if they separate, they
will tear apart entirely. I think she is right, although I feel
the need to share those memories with someone and I know that
you don’t mind listening to me. Besides, they could be of use
to you when you leave the village to join your other sister.
Udhë’s comments filled Father with fear. He rarely entered
the conversation and allowed Udhë to speak freely and unopposed
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 401
until the first rays of sunlight announced his departure. The
one who absorbed every sound and color of the conversation was
Udhë’s son, Gaetani, who always accompanied his father on those
long trips across the seven mountains. A few years later,
Gaetani left the village to search for work beyond the white
mountains where the people were as orderly as the big clocks in
the belfries that guarded their valleys. On that day, father
and son said good-bye to us with the certitude that great
changes were about to come to both families. “If the winters do
not stop getting longer, I may not be able to cross the
mountains next year,” Udhë said as his mule started the ascent
towards the first hill.
Not long after the departure of Gaetani, Uncle Udhë left one
morning to gather wood on the south side of the forest below
his village. He never returned, although his mule, laden with
chopped wood, did make his way back. Out of necessity, a
relative sold the mule in the village market more than once,
for whoever bought it would lose it the very next day. Daily
the mule descended into the forest to wait for Uncle Udhë at
the first signs of darkness. The search for the owner went on
for months. The family no longer attempted to sell the mule.
They became convinced that the faithful beast rode with Udhë
during the silence of the night to provide wood for all the
homes in the villages around the seven mountains.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 402
No one knows for certain when the door to Udhë’s house was
padlocked. The letter that Father’s sister received every now
and then brought some news, but Aunt Falucia, her eyesight
failing, never asked anyone else to tell her about Udhë. The
events of her own life were mired in secrecy until her last
days.
Filumena was the oldest living member of the Boletini family.
Her grandfather had carried her on his shoulders as they
escaped the burning wheat fields on the other side of the sea
where the sun still bleeds memories. The clan reached Sheshi
before the onset of winter. Filumena’s great-uncle had
continued the journey across the vast ocean because the small
plot of land they received in Sheshi was not enough to sustain
the extended family. I remember Father telling us that his own
father had made the difficult decision of sending his daughter
across the ocean at a tender age to find work with the help of
her great-uncle. “The burden of that decision weighed so
heavily on him that he never mentioned her name again as we sat
all together around the fireplace.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 403
Chapter Nine
Aunt Filumena left Sheshi with five lire sewn inside her
dress. It was all the savings that the relatives had been able
to gather. “Try not to spend any of it,” her father had
admonished as they were about to reach the city under the
volcano. “You are going to need it as you disembark from the
tall ship.” She was half asleep and not yet fully a woman. She
had just begun to see things with her own eyes. The starry sky
touching the few burning lights in the city brought a distant
smile to her face. Aunt Filumena was traveling with fifteen
other young girls, led by her father’s best friend. He promised
to take care of her until she could reach her great-uncle. In
return, Grandfather had promised to take care of the latter’s
land and to have it ready for planting when he returned. They
had come to trust one another since they had found each other
by chance hiding in the same ravine after the uprising in the
village on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. From that moment
on, they watched after each other’s family as if it were one.
They also made it a point to keep alive the memories of their
burned village in the eyes and hearts of their siblings.
With Aunt Filumena’s departure, the house filled with
unmentioned sadness. A deep sense of guilt had penetrated every
crevice in the four walls. “Your grandfather did not know whom
to blame for having to send his eldest daughter across the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 404
ocean to help out her younger sisters and brother. Your
grandmother had only one answer: it was best not to desire
things that are out of reach. She rarely spoke, but she walked
as if she had the strength to defy even fate.”
“I cried until there were no more tears to shed,” Aunt
Filumena recalled as she struggled to grasp a breath of air.
“It was the ocean with waves as high as the very mountains I
used to watch in Sheshi as I gathered water for the evening
meal from the fountain that made me realize that I was being
sacrificed by the family. The long voyage left me with a bitter
taste that only grew worse with the years. Now, as I find
myself more alone than ever, that bitter taste even takes my
sleep away.” She had spoken to me with a need to share her
intimate secrets, and a clear sign of relief made its way from
her pale blue eyes as she became certain that her memories
would not drown in the sea of forgetfulness. She told me where
to find her pile of letters. She had spent each minute of her
free time trying to find a compelling reason for her father’s
decision to send her across the ocean. Each letter wove
together every event of her life.
“I never saw any of the money inside the green envelope they
gave me at the end of the month. My great-uncle’s only comment
was that he would mail the money to my father. I saw very
little of the family as I spent more and more hours at the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 405
textile mill. The sweatshop was like a never-ending tunnel. At
the crack of dawn, each one of us took her place at a machine
and, but for the briefest of breaks, did not rise again until
the long siren at sunset. We exchanged very few words, and then
only to ask for news from Sheshi. I saw mothers and daughters
wither away there until the day they were replaced with other
women. At times I wondered if life for a woman in the village,
toiling in the fields under the hot sun, was any worse than the
one I found in the sweatshop. The rats were something else.
They never failed to gather around us during our fifteen-minute
break. They were just as hungry as we were, but they shared the
few crumbs that fell and disappeared as soon as we returned to
our places.
“On hot days, I missed the cool breeze that descended to our
home in Sheshi from the chestnut grove above the train station
where I had played with my rag doll away from my parents. I got
to know each of the trees and had secretly given them names.
Those trees never failed to bring the biggest chestnuts in all
the lands around the village. In fact, the grove became a
hiding place for most of the young girls of Sheshi. The trees
spoke a language that only we understood as we embraced them,
feeling a vibration that seemed to seep from the exposed roots
that girded each tree. That is how we grew up with each passing
season and it was with a sense of loss of something we could
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 406
neither explain nor prevent. What it might have been just
vanished when the first cold wind descended from the mountains.
In early winter, the mountains seemed to want to touch the sky
before slumbering away. The blue sky was tainted with streaks
of gray. I never saw that sky outside the sweatshop. Most of
the time, the sky was covered with the dark fumes that belched
from the tall chimneys at each end of the brick building. Even
when we sat together for our fifteen-minute break, we could not
see it.
“On Sundays, at my uncle’s home next to the railroad tracks,
I sat alone on the front porch. There were five of us, and,
although we were related, we did not look alike nor did we
speak the same language. After the Sunday meal, I had to wash
the dishes and do the laundry. Once a month, my great-uncle
wrote a letter to Mother and Father as if in my own words. ‘I
am working hard and I enjoy what I am doing. At the house, they
are all kind to me. I hope the money I am sending you is of
help. It is all that I can earn for now. Give a kiss to my
sisters and brother. You are always in my thoughts. I hope one
day to be together with you all.’
“Nights were frightening to me. I felt as lonely as my
grandmother’s tomb in the cemetery, where I could not place a
candle on All Souls’ Day. We rarely ventured out of my greatuncle’s house. He did not want his children to be exposed to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 407
the insults of the neighbors. They did not look kindly at us
and always whispered something that sounded like the growling
of a dog. I did not at first understand what they were saying,
but, with the passing of time, the strange sounds became
familiar and I was able to distinguish one house from another.
“The big war came and the streets filled with much more
anger. The eyes of some of the neighbors bulged like the eyes
of an owl. In the sweatshop, we worked longer hours than usual.
The workers’ faces changed every so often. Some would leave and
would never be seen again. Others came and took their places
without ever raising their eyes. We switched to making
soldiers’ uniforms. ‘The government wants you to work more for
less. We have to give back what they gave us,’ the owner
reminded us every morning as we saluted the flag and pledged
allegiance to it. I learned of the war at my great-uncle’s
house. It had been going on for months. I did not know why they
were fighting, nor who was involved in it until one evening
while my relatives listened to the radio with every window
shut. ‘Make certain the children stay at home after school. It
will be dangerous from now on to leave them unwatched in the
street. This war against our people is going to create troubles
for us,’ my great-uncle said to his wife.
“I asked my great-uncle what was going to happen to my
family in Sheshi. ‘We must protect each other here,’ he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 408
answered. ‘We are in the middle. Say as little as possible in
the shop and do not show any fear, at least for now.’
“It took only a few weeks for the town authorities to appear
at my great-uncle’s house. The four men, all dressed in black,
had parked their automobile in front and waited until they saw
him get off the trolley at the main street and walk straight to
the house. My great-aunt, who had been sewing at the window,
had noticed their presence hours before. She was waiting to see
her husband walking down the street as she did day after day.
But that late afternoon, he failed to look at the upstairs
window as he always did the minute he stepped off the trolley.
For all the years he had spent in the new land, he still could
not understand the language well enough to give an immediate
answer to the men. One of them walked straight towards him,
revealing a badge.
“That evening, my great-uncle and they spoke in the dining
room for more than one hour, but to us it seemed as long as the
nights during the hot summer months. When the four men left, he
gathered everyone together and told us the details of the
conversation. ‘They wanted to know if I belonged to the party
of the Black Shirts and if I spoke in our language to you. At
least, I think that is what one of them was asking. It was
difficult to tell because he spoke our language poorly. I told
him that at home we spoke an ancient language given to us by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 409
the gods through the eagles that still roam on those lands and
not the language he used in speaking with me.’
“Only much later did I learn that it was forbidden to speak
the language of the enemy. At home, after that evening, we
began to point at things instead of uttering their names. Life
there went on like that for more than two winters. In the early
spring of the third year, news came from all directions and
especially from the neighbors, who abruptly changed their
hostile attitude toward us. My great-uncle became more confused
than ever. We still did not know what the war had been all
about and, particularly, what we had had to do with it.
“Letters from Sheshi had not reached me for the longest time,
but when they did arrive finally, each was more desperate than
the previous one. There was famine in all the villages around
the seven mountains, and the wheat fields were filled with the
bodies of thousands of soldiers. ‘We have been burying whatever
limbs we could find so that the pain of the relatives would be
less. The air at times smells like the underground of the
church in the cemetery where they still keep the bones of our
dead. The animals in Sheshi have been frightened for so long
that they can no longer be tamed. This year it was impossible
to plant the wheat because the land is pocked with craters made
by the bombs that never stopped falling from November until the
end of December.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 410
‘Those who had spoken in favor of the war left, fearing for
their lives. Brother had turned against brother and, in some
cases, there was even shooting between fathers and sons. The
nights have turned into acts of revenge. The early hours of the
morning are used to clear the streets of the dead. The youngest
of your sisters, so frightened by the violence, has not spoken
a word since they started to collect the dead bodies of the
soldiers along the brook below the ravine of Old Sheshi. The
boys have stopped growing, even though the years are clearly
visible on their foreheads. Prefti Vlasi has told us that the
world moves backwards when the Devil rules.
‘“Sooner than you think, we will be moving back to the caves
at the edge of the village with all our animals,” he said on
Sunday during Mass. He has warned us of the peril of losing our
souls if we fall for the sweet words of the new order that
preaches equality for everyone and the abolition of private
property. Your mother is no longer with us. She decided to
leave the burden of raising and caring for your sisters and
brother to me. I did not know what was inside your mother’s
mind, although some nights I heard her sobbing. I guess the war
and the pain of seeing the hunger in the eyes of those she had
given life was too much for her to handle. I found her hanging
from the old fig tree above the train station.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 411
‘I tried to sell that piece of land even though I had saved
it to put together the dowry for two of your sisters, but no
one would buy it. People still claim to hear her crying into
the night as they return home from their own fields. They say
that the cry is like a wound that does not close but rather
bleeds more and more as one becomes aware of it. I have been
taking her water and bread every day as I was told to do by the
elders near the cave of the sacred serpent until thirty-three
days shall have come and gone. After that, I have been assured,
her soul will find rest among our dead in that corner of the
cemetery that looks toward the sunset.
‘The oldest of your sisters is carrying a big burden now,
but, if God wills it, she will soon have a family of her own. A
young man, who has been in the land across the ocean and by
chance was in the same town where your great-uncle has his
home, found the image of the blue river he had been looking for
right in your sister’s eyes. He is not from our own village; he
came to ours after he had been told that her eyes carried the
color of the fabled river. Every day she looks more and more
like your mother. Those who have forgotten the coming and going
of the seasons still call her by your mother’s name. She made a
pact with her husband-to-be that their first child should carry
the name of your mother and be cleansed with the waters from
the sacred cave.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 412
‘I am happy to say that her future husband has consented to
every wish your sister has expressed. We will depend on her as
we depend on you to feed the rest of the siblings.’
“I remember saving these letters, along with those written to
me by the trembling hand of the postman, in a pine box that
smelled of pine resin. After trying fruitlessly to decode the
secret messages and failing to distinguish one letter from
another, I burned all of them. At first, I felt sorry for the
young mail deliverer because of the sadness I saw in his eyes
and because of his inability to say anything when he handed me
the letters. He never failed to walk up the steps of the house
whether there was mail or not; when he reached the top stair,
he would pretend to search inside his leather pouch for
anything that had our name. Then he would leave with a single
wave of his hand, only to reappear the next day at exactly the
same time. Everyone at the house got so used to seeing him at
the precise hour of the day that there was no need to look at
the only clock we had, which hung on the kitchen wall where the
window stood overlooking a tall sycamore tree in the backyard.
“I began to feel a strange uneasiness that kept me awake
during the night. I also began to hide behind the window on the
second floor waiting for the postman to turn the corner at the
street above ours. It was then that I also started to sense an
urge similar to the one a mother has when she first places the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 413
tender mouth of her baby next to her nipple. A muddled desire
had begun to surge from the hollow recesses of darkness. It was
much later that I learned that it was part of growing up, a
preparation for severing one bond and establishing another.
“There came a time not long after a very cold winter that
caused a lot of deaths, especially among the elderly, when I
began to see the postman’s face everywhere I looked. At first
the apparitions frightened me because they revealed the effects
of time in that his initial look of sadness had turned to one
of complete resignation. This feeling of futility was never to
leave him.
“I decided to write a letter to my father explaining what was
happening to me. I did not mention anything to my great-uncle.
By this time I had learned to write from the others with whom I
worked and to receive mail there. I remember the bright clear
day when I received the response from Father. ‘There is a
letter for you at my desk,’ the floor supervisor said. ‘You can
pick it up after work on your way home.’
“The envelope smelled of eucalyptus flowers, similar to those
that still grow in the olive groves around Sheshi overlooking
the barren hill tops from where we saw the red poppies sail
with the spring breeze as we chased white butterflies. Father
understood everything I had asked him. ‘We are happy to learn
that you have become a woman and are ready to start your own
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 414
family,’ he wrote. ‘I only ask that you not forget your sisters
and, especially, your brother, who, as the last born, is
growing very frail without your mother’s love. Lately he has
become taciturn, and his eyes bear swirling scars when they
look at me. I decided to apprentice him to the village barber.
If what your great-uncle has told me is true, he will one day
make a decent living in the big city across the ocean. I am
convinced that he has inherited the sickness of all the young
men who want to leave Sheshi, although he has not mentioned a
word of it to me. Perhaps one day when you have settled down
with your own family in your own home you will be able to save
the money to sponsor him. But my real concern is the youngest
of your sisters. She has grown into a full woman faster than I
expected her to. She has received the best features from your
mother’s family and mine to the point that her beauty has
become a worry to me. For awhile, during the height of summer,
she had all the young men of the village daydreaming. They
would walk back and forth below our balcony trying to catch a
glimpse of her face. A week ago, a circus came to Sheshi and
your sister did not miss one performance. She was taken by the
skill and feats of a young trapeze artist who did somersaults
on top of a wire landing, at times, on just one foot. Your
sister followed him to the next town across the barren hills.
It took me three days to find her and bring her back home. We
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 415
returned to Sheshi at nights so as not to let anyone know where
she had been. Any knowledge of her escapade, as you know, would
have ruined her reputation as well as that of her sisters, not
to mention the ridicule that your younger brother would have to
carry with him for the rest of his life. For this reason, I
decided to send her to live with your other sister in her stone
house in the middle of the wheat field. Your mother’s death
left me a terrible burden. Sometimes, as I look down into the
square, I wish you were here to be like a mother to your
sisters. Your brother is still too young to be burdened with
the responsibilities that he has. Now you know why I sent you
to your great-uncle’s house across the ocean to help me put
together a dowry for each of them. I never intended to separate
you from us, but I could not see a way out of the misery that
was engulfing us and threatening our very existence. One day
you will understand how the preservation of one thing requires
the sacrifice of many other things.’ He closed the letter with
his usual reminder that I not fail to write at the end of each
month.
“The postman and I decided to ask my great-uncle for
permission to marry on Easter Sunday in front of the Church of
the Black Madonna. ‘Come visit us next Sunday and we will have
coffee together,’ my great-uncle said to Imiri, pretending not
to notice his trembling hand. The following Sunday Imiri showed
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 416
up with a box of pastries he had bought in his neighborhood
where at times he went to sit all alone hoping to recall among
all the faces who passed by those of his own parents. But Imiri
never learned what his parents looked like. They had died when
he was at the threshold of acquiring the memory that was to
weave his own life. He grew up in the sacristy of the
neighborhood church. That morning he woke up at the crack of
dawn, gathered all the strength he could harness and walked
unperturbed toward my great-uncle’s house. The tone of his
voice and his measured words left no doubt in my great-uncle’s
mind what he had come to demand. ‘I have come to claim the hand
of your niece.’ Even had he wanted to prevaricate, my greatuncle had not time. He faced a young man determined to tear
down any obstacle in front of him. ‘My answer is yes, but I
must consult with her father. I shall have my definitive answer
by the time I have mailed the letter and received an answer.
You just pray for good weather and calm seas so that the ship
can deliver the message.’
“The wait for the letter seemed an eternity. The sky darkened
for days, sending down rivers of water that forced people out
of their houses and onto higher elevations. Others were rescued
with long ropes from trees and rooftops as the sky continued to
discharge lightning. Soon after, floating homes began their
voyage towards the ocean. Grounded Canadian geese twirled their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 417
necks and remained motionless. These heavy rains were followed
by weeks of intense heat and unbearable humidity. The ground
soon cracked, opening deep crevices which threatened to swallow
the few remaining houses over the flat lands.
“ ‘If this scorching heat continues, we will have to move
closer to the mountains,’ asserted my great-aunt. ‘There is
plenty of water underground,’ my great-uncle reassured her. ‘I
will just have to dig deeper to tap into it.’ He knew how
important water was for his wife. Water brought to mind her
place of birth with no few tears. Her village mirrored into the
sea, extracting from it the blues for the window panes of her
house. On such a clear morning, she had joined groups of young
women chosen by the village dressmaker to sail across the ocean
to embroider the wedding gown for the last-born daughter of a
wealthy family. She had found herself in the waiting room
filled with people dressed in their own costumes and speaking
languages she could scarcely understand. It was there that she
came to see that the world was much bigger than she had been
led to believe. The people my great-aunt was able to observe,
moreover, did not resemble those of the stories she had heard
from her own grandmother. She felt cheated by a reality she had
never conceived of existing. After weeks of sailing on a Greek
ship where the sailors spoke a tongue similar to hers and of
feeling terribly frightened by the huge waves that washed
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 418
against her small round window, she reached port. There all the
women were sequestered by the father of the bride-to-be and
asked to stitch together the best wedding gown ever to have
been sewn anywhere in the world. The fifty women worked day and
night beneath the light of the sun and that of enormous
candelabras held by black boys who frightened most of the
women. They had never seen people with dark skin, minute curls
and ivory teeth. ‘Their skin must have darkened by being
constantly next to the candles,’ was their logic. It took these
women four full weeks to weave one of the finest wedding gowns
ever made.
“The father of the bride called fifty of the strongest men
from his steel plant, gave each a bar of Irish soap to wash the
grime from their face and hands, and trained them to carry the
train of the gown with perfectly coordinated precision. The
fifty men, twenty-five to a side and all exactly the same
height, formed a perfect entourage for the rest of the world to
see. Although the weavers were not invited to the wedding, each
received a white favor with a roasted almond affixed.
“That was the last time I saw that group of women,” lamented
my great-aunt. “Each was sent where she was needed. I was taken
by train and then by carriage to a textile mill next to a wide
river they called ‘Lawrence.’ The river roared like a
frightened beast when it rained, sending its waters very close
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 419
to the railroad tracks that came inside the brick building. It
was on that landing that they unloaded large cotton bales and
then reloaded the trains with the garments we stitched. At
least, that was how it seemed to me, for the work shifts never
stopped day or night; each of us took turns going home just to
remember that we had a place, no matter how small it was.
“My own was a small room in boarding house owned by an
elderly couple who spoke more or less the same language we did.
We greeted one another the same way we did in the old country,
and the aroma from the kitchen where the wife cooked on Sunday
mornings was the same smell that I took with me when I left my
home by the sea. Many a Sunday, I shed tears, because the aroma
brought to mind those familiar sounds that one understood
without needing to interpret them. As well, it reawakened in me
the hunger and guilt in my mother’s eyes as she had sought to
reassure me.
“ ‘We will be here waiting for you to come back with some
savings so that your father can buy that parcel of land where
the sun shines all day long. With that land, we’ll have all
that we need to face the winters. Besides, you will be going
with the other girls from our village. They also are going
there for the same reasons. The clerk in the town hall told me
that the announcement from the consulate calls for girls who
are skillful in weaving, and you are one of the best in the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 420
village. Your father was hoping that they would be calling for
men, as they did years ago, to work deep in the coal mines,
even though the work is dangerous and shortens one’s life by
half.’ Those were the last words I was to hear from my mother.
“Neither I nor any of the other girls could refuse this
opportunity. But deep inside I felt a foreboding mingled with
an anger that I could not unleash against anyone in the
village, for I did not know whom to blame. What I did know,
however, was that those who had left the village out of
desperation came back years after beaten and changed to the
point that they were no longer recognizable. Nor could they
regain the road they had left behind.
“But time changes all things even as it itself lasts forever.
People are but little pebbles that, unseen by anyone, will one
day turn into dust ready to be washed away with the first rains
of autumn. Of the thousands of ships that came through the
river, the one which had brought us to this land never did
return. Daily from my window at home I watched the men load and
unload the boats and wondered at the spectacle. Some mothers
held their neatly wrapped babies while the more grown up
youngsters, their eyes perplexed and curious, held tightly to
their mother’s long skirts. I waved at them, and they waved
back. Then, I would see them no more. It took me a little while
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 421
to realize that each of those families had a place to go that
no one else knew.
“One day, as I stood at the window still waiting for the ship
to come back, I saw the young man for the first time. I can
still see him walking through the street, dressed in a deep
blue tie and bearing a dark brown suitcase. It must not have
been very heavy, for he walked with a swift, nimble and
determined step that left no doubt in the mind of anyone who
happened to witness his arrival that early spring morning. The
town of Lawrence was up for some changes, and the young man did
not hesitate to bring them about the first chance he had.
“During the feast of the patron saint of the poor, he carried
the statue of Saint Rock which bore deep scars on one knee and
a faithful dog next to the other, licking the wound. This
celebration brought people from as far away as one could
imagine. Some came by train or bus, but others even had cars to
display to the less fortunate. It was an occasion to see and to
be seen, to look for a future husband or wife, or simply to
meet old acquaintances and reminisce about the old country over
a glass of wine. At night, there were music and songs. The
elderly sat misty-eyed in front of the raised podium, straining
to hear and to keep time with every sound. The young men and
women scouted the area barely able to hide their desire to spot
someone who stirred their imagination.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 422
“It was during the last of the three nights of festivities
that the young man with the face of the Saint being celebrated
passed below my window and bade me good evening. Even now,
after so many years have gone by, I still can feel the shiver
that ran through my body when his voice pierced the glass of
the window pane to reach me, leaving behind a clear round hole
in the shape of a daisy. That voice was like the sound of a
child looking for a familiar face amidst the intense silence of
a growing crowd. The determined vibration lodged firmly within
my body, giving it new strength and setting my heartbeat to the
rhythm of the words spoken. That night I prayed for the
celebrations never to end. My dreams had the color of the sea
that washed ashore near our home with the fishing boats dancing
to the movement of the waves.”
The images of childhood had begun to play tricks on my greataunt. She spent hours at the window waiting to see the face of
that young man who looked so much like the saint who bleeds
from his right knee. “Months went by without my seeing him
again. At work his face drew closer and closer to me, and at
night we held hands over a cup of tea. But one afternoon, the
honeymoon came to an end.
“The wind, which had been blowing fiercely all day long,
brought to my feet a half-torn page of newspaper with a
photograph of a person curled like a cat, almost completely
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 423
covered in blood. It was the very man for whom I had been
waiting for so long, the man who was to have claimed me for the
rest of time. I learned that same day that he had been beaten
to death during a strike to demand better and safer conditions
for the textile workers. His killer was never found; I don’t
even know where he is buried. For days I looked for his name on
the tombs in the cemetery on the other side of the frozen
river, but to no avail. He had come and gone during the three
days of celebration. On a nameless gravestone I placed the
picture of the Saint with the Bleeding Knee. I visited the
gravesite until we were taken to another city much bigger and
busier than Lawrence. It was there that I first saw your greatuncle as he got off the trolley.
“The streets were full of horse-drawn carriages and slowmoving automobiles. The noises silenced the footsteps of the
people, and the smoke from the many tall chimneys cast a black
veil over the faces of those moving about much like dark clouds
on a stormy night. The image of the sea beyond the seven
mountains of Sheshi was fast disappearing from my mind. I was
afraid of not finding my way back home. The row of houses that
lined the many wide streets of the new city people called
‘Paterson’ could be seen as far as the eyes could look, all
orderly, with manicured green lawns. The people who lived in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 424
those homes must have been drawn to them like birds to their
nests.
“We were placed in barracks on the grounds of the tall brick
factory, which had as many sewing machines as there were
people. These were people with frightened faces, who never
looked directly into anyone’s eyes. I was placed with those who
spoke more or less the way we did in the village. Each one had
a story to tell that was never told. It died slowly within each
woman in that dim place where humidity turned the air to lead,
especially on the hot summer days. The leaves on the few trees
I could see from the window quickly turned to brown dust. I
held the image of the Virgin of Constantinople and the eyes the
color of the sea closer to my chest until I married the
postman.
“The postman had secured a job in the textile building to be
closer to me. One day in late December he whispered softly into
my ear that he had begun to make plans to build me a house
bigger than the one in the center of town. ‘The front lawn will
be full of fruit trees,' he said with a smile that smelled of
pure innocence. His determination was like the taste of bread
freshly baked. It revived in me the security I had felt at home
when we sat altogether waiting for permission from Father to
reach for a slice of bread warm from the hearth. His revelation
opened my eyes to my childhood dreams and brushed away the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 425
darkness of the tunneled sweatshop. For the first time I felt
the ground, and I began to notice the many details present in
the big city. I breathed more deeply, and I burned with the
desire to be the proprietor of one of those houses on the wide
avenue and to receive mail with my name on it. The dream was
quickly washed away with the coming of the rainy season from
the South.
“The supervisor of the plant had begun to send letters of
dismissal to many of the workers. ‘I am going to have to let
you go because I haven’t received any more orders from our
buyers.' He gave the same line to all the employees. They read
the lines the best they could. Things went from bad to worse in
just a few months at the textile mill. With the help of the
local priests, the women built a shrine at the foot of a spring
behind the brick building, but neither the Saint with the Tears
in His Eyes nor the flowing waters of the spring could stop the
growing lines at every street corner. People waited patiently
to get a bowl of soup prepared by those in dark uniforms with
an “S” imprinted on the hat.
“The neighborhood was slowly being abandoned. People
disappeared overnight to beg for work in the neighboring
cities. I could hear the children crying on the surface of the
river before the night silenced them. Many of those who had
left came back hungrier than before. The others who had been
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 426
lured into lands of blinding lights were never heard from
again.
“I saved all the seeds I could so as to provide for us in the
coming winter. Clashes with the police began to occur as days
went by and the promises that we would return to work were not
kept. Among those returning was the young man with the face of
a saint. He smelled of freshly-cut roses, and he was seen
walking on the water of the river to reach town. He had been
searching for the enchanted place of his dreams on the banks of
the river wider than any known sea. He came to sit on the steps
of our home, shivering with a burning fever under the frozen
rain and the biting north winds. ‘I have come to pray at the
shrine,’ he said the morning I opened the door. I took him in
and placed him next to the fireplace. He vanished soon after,
leaving behind a cross of ashes on the opening of the
fireplace.
“Starvation had encircled the town. No one dared to speak of
it as each family tried to grow as many vegetables as it could
in the backyard. The hope of returning to work had begun to
wane. The soldiers came and urged the young men to join the
army for the preservation of the country and for a better
future. The news from Sheshi also spoke of mass killings in
many towns. Young men all in black sang songs of death. The
rivers turned red and the air smelled of burned flesh. Many
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 427
were forced to drink castor oil in the public squares of the
villages. Even in our own neighborhood in Paterson the men
dressed in black and mocked death. They marched daily singing
songs I could not understand. My great-uncle barely left the
house and had begun to speak of mountains exploding into flames
that formed rivers of fire. ‘Terrible things are in store for
us,’
he would say to me day after day as he struggled to give
meaning to those dreams with the hope that I would discard them
as pure tricks of sleepless nights. He was right. Soon the
songs turned into screams and the talk of war around the world
was the daily conversation among the people gathering at every
street corner. It was at this time that your father wrote to
me.
“‘I have decided to take the two oldest of my children across
the seven mountains and cross the ocean. The war has littered
the fields with bones. Mothers are feeding roots to their
children, for their breasts have gone dry. No one comes into
the barber shop anymore.’
“Long periods of drought accompanied the war, and when the
rains finally came, the hills of Paterson awoke to a strange
odor that filled every house with unknown perfumes. Flowers of
all colors had sprouted, climbing trees to garland every window
they could find en route to the rooftops. The hills of the town
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 428
looked like the cover of some of the books I had seen stored in
the basement of my great-uncle’s house in Clifton. The birds
sang and the flowers danced in the winds as the leaves came
down from the trees to form a place of rest for the yellow
butterflies. 'If these flowers continue to grow the way they
have been growing, we’ll have to climb over the tree tops to
see each other, ' the postman, now my husband, would write to
me on the white petals that the bluebird, who was building his
nest on my window, daily delivered to me.
“The smell of flowers was everywhere. Many forgot their
initial sensation of phobia and began to catalogue the variety
of flowers that had appeared from the crevices of the dried
earth. At times, the thickness of the growth above, and the
intricate movements of the stalks growing whichever way they
could, left no space unutilized and prevented people from
observing the flowers beneath those above. Some, however, were
able to record the different hues that changed according to the
time of day. The closeness of the place prompted many a person
to devise a new language based on the countless colors
available. Some even devised specific steps to convert the
colors into sound by placing a letter next to each and wrapping
them carefully until the people could no longer distinguish the
color from the sound.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 429
“Physical changes began to appear in people sooner than
expected. In some, the eyes replaced the ears in a matter of
weeks, changing completely the shape of the head. The eyes
began to function like antennae, opening and closing according
to the color that was in front of them. My husband became
extremely concerned. There was no need to deliver any letters
because people had simply forgotten how to write from within.
“The telegraph itself was rapidly being replaced by the long
arch of the horizon. Each color in it held a code that could
only be deciphered by the couples involved. It wasn’t long
before a long list of color languages were devised with which
mother and daughter, father and son, husband and wife could
communicate. The one that proved to be the most difficult to
standardize was the language of lovers. A special key was
needed that only couples could create together.
“For a long time my husband and I flew over places that
looked clearer than the dreams that appear just before sunrise.
As he grew older, he came to look more and more like the child
whom the Madonna holds on the right side of the altar. Sensing
that he was slowly withering away, he held onto my skirts,
fearful of slipping away from me. We got married with each
feeling sorry for the other, in the way that one responds to a
plant that is about to shy away from the rays of the sun.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 430
“In two years and a few months we were blessed with two
children. They looked as old as we did in only a month’s time;
days for them became months, and months became years. Sooner
than seemed possible, people could not tell us apart. Both of
the children fell ill one fall day just before the trees lost
their leaves. The two shut themselves in their rooms. It took
twelve men to bear them away to a distant hospital, wrapped in
the heavy white shrouds with which we bind the dead in our old
village. This event utterly silenced their father until the
last moment before he expired in that rundown hospital where
the rats kept everyone awake through the night. ‘We should have
stayed up there on top of the horizon, weaving the colors of
the dawn with hose of the sunset,’ was all he was able to say
before he lowered his head gently onto the left side of the
pillow, taking on precisely the same appearance as that of his
son the minute after he was born.”
That was all Aunt Filumena was able to whisper to me after
the stroke left her half-paralyzed from her mouth all the way
down to her right arm. The entire left side of her body had
shrunk considerably, but not even that could stop her from
making soup and preparing coffee for all those who lived in the
tenement house. It was the only building still standing, yet
she kept basil and parsley growing in flats on most of the
window sills. The elderly in the neighborhood considered it to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 431
be the last island left, one accessible only to those who still
carried the keys of memories. The letters from the old country
had stopped coming to Aunt Filumena, although she never ceased
waiting for the letter carrier who had stopped crossing the
street many years ago.
The morning after our conversation, my aunt did not open the
door to call her friends over for coffee. Instead, she remained
seated at her kitchen table, finishing the last words of a
letter she was sending to her father. It had taken her left
hand months to scribble her pain onto the white page. In the
letter she spoke of being tired of waiting for her father to
come and get her. “I won’t be able to close my eyes,” she wrote
unsteadily, for the pen moved with her feelings and not with
her fingers, “unless you come here. I have been waiting for you
to come from the moment I buried the father of my children. Now
I would like to come back home and take my place among the
people of the village. It does not matter to me whether they
are still living or have gone to join those who came before
us.” Even though the letter was difficult to read, since the
page contained scribbling more than anything else, in the
spaces between the words was the lucidity of a sky after a
heavy storm. I put my aunt’s letter away before I arranged a
decent burial for her.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 432
In the parlor where the body lay were just a few flowers. The
heavy rains that had fallen in the previous hours kept the few
people whom she had known in her building for two generations
from coming to the wake. Sister and I sat at each end of the
first row. I do recall the heaviness of her lifeless body, no
longer opposing the magnetic force of matter about to claim it
forever. Outside, the dark clouds announced a premature end to
the day. The two dim lights on each side of the wall cast the
faces of the few people present into shadow. One of them
clasped her fingers nervously. Eyes cast to the floor, she
avoided looking at the still powdery body in the plastic inner
lining of the coffin. Another, whose heavy breathing could be
heard from where I sat, looked fixedly at my sister, whose
appearance so markedly differed from everything else that
decorated the room.
I looked at my watch. “Just a few minutes before the priest
will come in.” I had been told by the person in charge that the
priest would be arriving at seven. “He has never been late,
although he still walks from his parish here even though it is
a good distance away. The rain won’t delay him. Once there were
two feet of snow on the ground, and still he wasn’t a second
late.” The attendant had scarcely finished this reassurance
when the priest, aided by a cane topped with the shape of a
dog, walked in. His skin was darker than the long cassock held
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 433
together by a long file of black buttons; his eyes were two
small white circles deeply shadowed by thick eyelashes.
The priest opened his breviary and proceeded with the
ceremony without having to turn the page to continue. Clearly,
he knew what was written so well that turning the pages was
merely a formality in keeping with the requirements of the
Church. Yet, his face bore the signs of pain and sadness as he
blessed the body, entrusting its soul to God Almighty, “the one
who receives us all when the road comes to an end.” Taking out
his white handkerchief from a side pocket, he blotted sweat
from his brow. Then, having been assisted by the attendant in
donning his coat and retreating to the front door, the priest
turned and bade us goodbye with a lazy gesture of his right
arm.
The rain was coming down in sheets by now, hitting the glass
windows with fury. “If you wish, you may remain a bit longer,”
the attendant soothed, although he was obviously in a hurry to
close the doors for the night. He knew full well that the heavy
rains would not bring any more visitors. One of the elderly
ladies murmured something to the other as they made the sign of
the cross at the door and closed it gently behind them. The
attendant offered them an umbrella he had brought from his
office, which they accepted courteously.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 434
My sister and I also left promptly. As the elderly women
proceeded us to the bus stop a few feet away from the funeral
home, I noticed that one of them was limping, one leg being
longer than the other. The second, considerably younger and
visibly angry, placed the umbrella over the head of her
companion. “It seems we are living just to bury the dead,” she
fumed to me without lifting her eyes from the direction of the
bus. “It is that time of the cycle of things, and it is to be
expected,” I replied, knowing with certainty that the answer
was not going to please her.
The bus was completely empty, but for the driver. It was that
hour of the evening in which the streets become naked,
revealing the stark callousness of the tenement buildings. The
homes differed very little from one another. The suspended fire
escapes in front of each apartment dripped showers of
corrosion. “The house is too empty without our younger
brother,” she added, further reflecting the desolation that was
all around us. The bus driver seemed anxious to add a few more
passengers, delaying a bit longer at each stop and looking all
around to see if anyone were running to catch the bus. No one
got on, not even at our stop. “Good night, now,” he said as he
slid the door closed.
The rain continued to come down heavily. “It won’t be long
before he comes home,” I told Sister as we walked toward the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 435
house. The light at the entrance was not lit, and the
desolation by now touched the very bones of the neighborhood.
“We should never have left the village,” she blurted
unexpectedly. “Look what has happened to us. One by one they
leave, and we no longer have the strength to keep them in our
memories. If things keep on happening this way, we won’t
remember ourselves the way things used to be.”
I cloaked myself in silence, for I knew we were losing our
battle against forgetfulness. There was no time to waste; we
must rush back to the few images deep in the caves of our
minds.
The rain had stopped, but it had left a putrid smell in the
air. The only lights in the street were those of the corner bar
and the passing automobiles sliding over the surface of the wet
road. Our tenement house was the only structure still standing
among piles of broken bricks and loose mortar. Even the black
crows which used to fly over it once in awhile had stopped
coming months ago. “It will not be long before this last
building will also have to come down,” Sister observed
spiritlessly, avoiding the broken bottles.
The dread of being evicted weighed heavily on her mind. She
had accumulated too many little things in that house that kept
the past alive. “I am having a tough time keeping all those
photographs together. Some of them are turning yellow, and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 436
others are developing mold on the surface.” She had found a way
of keeping those faces fixed inside her own clock. “It is a
simple process,” she would say. “I learned it from Mother.
Sister placed the photographs on the table with a small white
candle in front of them. The arrangement created a
communicative code understood by her alone. But taking her
place among the people in the photographs exacted a heavy price
from her; she grew older by the month, her hair now entirely
white and her skin barely attached to the bones. Indeed, she
started to look more and more like the array of people in those
pictures.
Each photograph was encircled in its own time and gave off a
pungent odor of unknown herbs. The box where Sister kept the
photographs had turned into a multicolored niche. The organisms
living in it had carved deep crevices into the nearest walls,
until a diffusing scent invaded the entire apartment. Not long
after, the table in the middle of the kitchen began to fill
with people sitting close to one another, deep in conversation.
They seemed totally unconcerned with anything other than
themselves. It was as if the clocks had been turned back,
meeting the unfulfilled desires of everyone present at the
table. It was a poignant yet not entirely joyless to see those
people from the photographs altogether, making the best of the
situation without bitterness. At midnight, these folk left the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 437
table, one by one, and took their places inside the box, neatly
stacked as they had been since the time no one had dared to
recall them. Silence was tinged with loneliness until the first
signs of light.
In a short time, Sister became an active participant in the
appearance and disappearance of the people in the photographs.
With each passing day, she became more and more diminutive. She
had begun to change into so many forms that I became confused
as to which was the real one. One evening, as I was returning
from college much later than usual due to a blackout which had
surrounded much of the institution, I found myself engulfed by
people coming from all directions. Completely disoriented by
the darkness, I had to rely upon mostly unfamiliar sounds,
sounds to which I had previously paid no attention. I had been
going in circles for hours when I happened to reach the river
and heard the familiar sound of its flowing. I felt the spikes
of the steel railing. Looking across the river, I was
astonished to see that the broad avenue lined with sycamores
was as brightly lit as if in full sunshine. Clearly, the
electric company was selectively denying some areas electricity
in order to preserve it for others.
Such blackouts had been frequent, actually, but on this
sultry night the dark period was particularly long, stranding
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 438
and confusing a host of people. Indeed, many were never to find
their way back to the one place they could remember.
It must have been very late by the time I reached my own
neighborhood. An especially bright moon revealed the corroded
veins of the bricks on the tenement house. The brittle cement
was coming off much faster than I had imagined; worse, still,
the fire escape was no longer there. I noticed that the
entrance door had been left ajar. Inside, the walls gasped for
air. There was no one to be seen, with the exception of an
unusually large black spider in the corner above the window
overlooking what had once been the secluded vegetable gardens
between the buildings. The intricate spider web reached all the
way to the half-open box filled to the brim with photographs.
The long thread connecting the two held the secret to the
oppressive silence that had taken over all the windows of the
apartment house.
I picked up the picture box and the few books next to it. By
then, the silence had almost sealed the exit door with
countless layers of slime as dry as old glue. From the end of
the street I turned to glance back at the building; it was no
longer there. Rather, the piles of bricks kept growing larger
as the bright light of the moon slaked their long thirst.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 439
As I waited for the bus to cross the river back to the
college, I knew that I was closing a chapter, the remnants of
which lay hidden inside the wooden box of photographs.
I found a room next to the college in the attic of a singlefamily home and began to work every night at a new job with an
import and export company. In every newspaper, headlines
heralded yet another war, causing people to move faster and
faster from place to place, as if fearing to meet a stray
bullet. But the sudden news of the death of their young
president in the square of a southern city emptied the streets,
leaving a looming air betokening the end of a feast. They never
found out who shot that one bullet from the foreign gun. Years
later, all those who had read the newspapers decided to come to
their own conclusions, having found no convincing evidence for
all the theories offered. The president was buried among the
tears of millions. Old and young alike lined the road that led
to the mausoleum, creating rivers of pain which converted all
the land around it into a serpentine desert.
The days were quick to come and slow to leave. At the old
café on the main avenue leading to the library, the few
customers had grown more taciturn than ever. I sat there in the
late afternoons, still waiting for the one who sat across the
study table in the library to turn the corner. I waited for
days, even changing the hour of the wait, but no one bearing
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 440
any sort of resemblance to her passed by. The room I had once
rented from the old lady with the cigar in her mouth was no
longer available. I would have to vacate the attic room in two
weeks. “I will go back to our neighborhood to await the
postman. Will the letter be there?”
By now the war had been raging for months, reports of it
arriving from foreign news stations. Darius may not have been
released yet. “I’ll be back on a rainy day,” he had said, the
day before he had to appear at the military headquarters at the
edge of the city where the waters from the wide river became
one with the ocean. Upon his return one dreary, rainy day, I
saw him searching for the house absent mindedly as he stood
outside the entrance of the corner bar. A faint smile was the
only expression on his aged face.
“I have been looking for the house for hours, but I only
stumbled upon a pile of bricks,” he said with a tone that
clearly revealed his confusion. “The house was condemned a few
months ago,” I replied. “The termites had eaten away part of
the main beam. The other homes on the block had already fallen
on top of each other like a deck of cards. The two sons of the
meat-cutter would not spend any money to save the building.
Unlike the old man, they did not care for the people living in
it.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 441
Although visibly older, Darius’ actual age was difficult to
guess. The wrinkles on his forehead were beginning to resemble
those of Father. In his voice one could hear the resigned tone
of one searching for a place to rest after a long day’s work.
The small green knapsack he carried told the rest of the story.
We walked to the bus stop as a steady drizzle soaked our
clothes. Chilled and saying very little, we were the only two
waiting anxiously for the bus to arrive. It came, sliding
noiselessly over the wet road. The red front lights, shining
menacingly, barely pierced the thick fog. Only one passenger
alighted, but a feeling of vagueness overwhelmed him. Convinced
that it was the wrong stop, he scampered back up the steps and
asked the bus driver for the name of the location. Satisfied,
he descended again and began to walk towards the train station.
Once aboard, Darius and I were the only two passengers. Every
now and then, the driver glanced at us quickly in his mirror,
not without a certain apprehension. “I will stay for just a few
days and then I’ll be moving on.”
“Where will you go?” I asked, unable to show any concern
or disquietude about his plans. His years in the army had
erased the childish fear he had brought with him form the
village. “I’ll move out West where they say people can plant
seeds in every season.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 442
I did not ask my brother anything else. It was clear that
even the years in the army had not erased his childhood
memories. His essential core had nourished that child of the
past, now ready to take over and to despise the rest of his
years. The members of the family had come and gone like the
seasons, leaving behind whatever one could gather before they
disappeared. This was the last time we rode the bus together.
In my attic room, we went over the photographs, lingering for
a long time on each in total silence. Darius chose a few and
carefully placed them inside an envelope he drew from the green
knapsack. “I will take these with me so that one day I can find
my way back to Sheshi.” They were the only pictures of our
grandparents we had. The old patriarch sat on the wooden chair
with Grandmother’s hands bashfully placed on his shoulders.
Mother had kept the picture frames on the side of the balcony
in the one-room house in Sheshi. My grandmother, tall and
proud, had inherited all the features of her own mother, adding
another layer of bark to the trunk of tree that no wind could
tear away.
It was said in the village that our mother spoke with the
dead every night after reciting the rosary and that she took no
decision without first consulting with them. “With their
guidance,” my brother now asserted, “I am certain I will find
my way back to the village. I have collected all the seeds I
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 443
could find while the men in my company busied themselves in
killing and burning in those lands where the rains never
stopped. I will plant the seeds on the hill where our
grandmother hanged herself.”
I had no reason to doubt his conviction. Now I recalled the
words of Master Tuliuci with the clarity I had lacked
previously: “Opening the eyes at birth is searching for the
road back to the font of memories. Our existence is the
labyrinth that each of us must identify and traverse with the
help of those who know us better than the others.”
Early in the morning we departed, not without a certain fear
that neither of us bothered to hide. I saw Dario vanish into
the crowd. I could barely make out the arm he raised as he
probably looked back before being swallowed by the anonymity of
those around him. It was then that I realized that the tie that
had held us together was no longer there. In a rush, a deep
desire for the warmth of the church steps in the square of
Sheshi took complete control of me. The photographs in the
wooden box were all that was left of a world I was determined
to rescue from forgetfulness.
It was not long after that that things began to take their
final place in life. Enthralled by an intense light emanating
from the box in red waves and streaking the walls of the room
with white, I became aware of the heat that had settled on the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 444
village square after the ringing of the church bells. It was
turning the few leaves still clinging to the branches of the
almond trees into wrinkled brown paper. The few people who had
lingered longer than usual had now left, abandoning the square
to the noise of the water bursting from the mouth-shaped spouts
of the fountain. The swallows had flown to their hiding places,
and the cicadas had left the heights of the olive trees for a
dip into the cold waters of the basin. At sundown, Sheshi’s
square would fill again with the same people who demanded
information about the young woman whose lacerated body the
shepherds had found down in the ravine as they searched for a
few blades of grass amidst the shade of the chestnut trees.
On that early morning, before the sun spread its wings over
the entire village of Sheshi, Maria had awoken to find in her
bed the young man with whom she had been talking in her dreams.
A cold sweat had descended down her tender back, and her lower
body trembled uncontrollably, but the untraceable fear
disappeared the moment she looked at that beautiful face inside
the silver frame to the left of her bed. The sheet, which her
mother had washed the night before with a special soap scented
with a variety of flowers and bay leaves, now smelled of sweat,
and the coagulated red stains clearly visible there filled
Maria’s mother with fear. She carefully checked every part of
her daughter’s body, but, finding neither cut nor scratches,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 445
she dismissed the need to make the bed anew or even to awaken
her daughter from her deep sleep.
In Maria’s mind, the young man’s body grew in appeal. The
more she looked at him, the more she felt dragged away by the
fierce force of a rushing river. Only the noise of the mules’
hooves clattering on the stony road placed her on the side of
the raging waters. The dream was still too fresh in her mind
for her to dispel the presence of the beautiful young man as
nonsense. But when she washed herself, Maria for the first time
in her life felt the presence of a stranger lodged in the inner
recesses of her body.
The ceiling of the stone washing room, where she had gone to
cleanse herself with a white cloth, was filled with fire ants,
some of them still glowing from the previous night. The
humidity of the evening had forced the insects to find shelter
in the cool place. A feeling of disquiet slowly overtook
Maria’s thoughts as she recalled hearing her mother speak of
the fire ants as the souls of those who come back from the
realm of the dead to accompany the ones who are about to cross
the wall separating the living from them. It was not for
herself that she feared what was now inevitable; rather, it was
for someone in her family.
Maria made the sign of the cross three times and washed
herself, discovering deep black lines underneath her chestnut-
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 446
colored eyes. “I must be coming down with something,” she said
to herself incongruously, and thought no more of it. As she
returned her glance to the ceiling, she saw that the fire ants
had disappeared, even though the washing room had no window.
They had left behind a musty odor that reminded her of the
smell inside the cellar where they kept the wine and the salted
meats for winter.
As she emerged from the room, Maria discovered that her
father had already left for the fields without his usual cup of
black coffee and the piece of hard bread that he dipped into
it. That morning, her mother, impelled by that inexorable
feeling that binds a mother to her child, had decided to
reenter her daughter’s room. The howling of the neighborhood
dogs guarding the flocks of sheep in the ravine startled her.
The dogs’ baying was like the cries of human beings “hurled
into the tunnel of death…” the image the villagers had always
used for describing death’s coming. Maria’s mother knew
instinctively that her family was to be the host for this
dreaded visitor, who never failed to reach his destination; the
sweat and red spots marring the bed sheets confirmed her
conviction. Gripping the back of the chair that stood at the
end of the bed, still holding her daughter’s clothes, the woman
was puzzled by the fact that the left side of the bed was
untouched, the cover pulled taut. The bewilderment that took
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 447
possession of her that morning was to last until she no longer
could distinguish one day from another; it gnawed at the womb
where she had given life to the one who was about to lose it.
The mother left the room petrified, but she did not betray
her feelings to her daughter as she abstractedly went about her
usual morning chores. These included ridding the house of all
the dust that had penetrated since the day before. The one
thing that she did forget to do was to greet her daughter; but
if the latter noticed the oversight, she made little of it,
absorbed as she was in her task of preparing lunch for the
workers going to the fields to cut the wheat. “Don’t forget the
jug of red wine…the one with the crooked top… which is in the
corner as you enter the wine cellar.” At this admonition, the
daughter, folding the rag filled with bread and cheese,
suddenly recalled her dream. She could not know that, early
that morning, even before the sun peeked out from behind the
last dark cloud and while she was still asleep, her mother had
already interpreted that dream and shared it with her father
and brother.
Feeling a cold chill run down her spine, Maria sensed that
the distinct pleasure she had experienced during the night in
the presence of the young man with the face of an angel and
whose rosy breath she could still smell was now turning into a
dark vision taking her breath away and making her heart pound
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 448
as if it wanted to burst our of its enclave. She felt a deep
silence in her mother, and the women next door to their home
went about their chores with a coldness that frightened her.
The young woman felt detached from things, as if nothing really
belonged to her. Everyone around her felt like complete
strangers. Even the row of houses on each side of the street
seemed unfamiliar, as if they guarded secrets that she would
never come to know. And yet she felt as if she had known
everything about them, including each piece of furniture,
curtain and coverlet.
A deep urge to run to her grandmother’s house at the bottom
of the village took possession of Maria; she wanted to speak to
her of her dream and to ask her why everything that she had
known so well now seemed so strange. But her desire was
abruptly truncated. Her mother, having already gathered the
midday meal, now commanded her to take it to the fields before
the sun scorched the earth. “Take the food to them before the
sun reaches the top of the bell tower.”
At midday, the sun could be seen directly over the bell
towers from every point in the village and the surrounding
fields. The heat was intense, and Maria could not recall a
warmer day in all the seasons of her life. The songs of the
cicadas hummed through the fields, and the lizards had invaded
the dusty country road looking for shade among the crevices in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 449
the volcanic stones that bordered it. From afar, the church
bells had stopped clamoring. “It must be past twelve,” Maria
whispered to herself. Troubled with the fruitless effort of
trying to remember the intimate details of the young man with
the face of the angel, she quickened her pace, not wanting to
be late in delivering lunch to the workers. The wheat field was
at the bottom of the ravine, and the shortest route to it was a
narrow, steep path used mostly by the shepherds. Maria
remembered it, for, as a child, she had run along it after the
goats, trying to beat them to the top of the hill. Now she
hastened to take the narrow path, unaware that on that day the
caretaker of the main church in Sheshi had begun to ring the
bells fifteen minutes early. Not owning a watch, and never
having learned to tell time, he had asked another for the hour
and had been given the wrong time.
On a whim, and in spite of her haste, Maria decided to
surprise her father with fresh water from the spring that
flowed among the chestnut roots at the base of the hill, a
shaded spot where the sun never penetrated through the thick
foliage. Now the girl could smell the wild strawberries as she
gingerly moved one foot at a time, first testing the ground and
then looking for a branch to hold onto. She remembered the
thrill of going down the same path, imitating the movements of
the goats and anticipating dipping her feet into the cool
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 450
waters that flowed between the wild strawberries and the snow
white flowers whose name she did not know. She had never asked
her mother for the name of the flowers, for fear of revealing
her secret hideout. She could not wait to look at herself in
the water, where her face danced gently in the circles that her
fingers drew.
Maria took a quick glance at the sky and saw a blue as deep
as that which could be seen at times right before sundown. That
was before the sky, seen from midway to the bottom of the
ravine, filled with dark birds. Their droppings began to fall
like rain, filling the ravine and making the path invisible. At
that very moment, Maria felt a heavy hand on the lower part of
her back. She swore that she recognized the touch, but she had
no time to say anything. Her throat choked with an overwhelming
fear as she landed in the pool of water, now clogged with bird
droppings.
No one bothered to look for the girl. The men, still waiting
for their lunch and their jug of wine, settled instead for the
cheese and hard bread which the father, betraying no sign of
nervousness, drew from the reserve he kept in the limestone
cave. But Maria’s brother, Selim, refused to sit down with the
men and went instead to feed the mule. The clamor of the
cicadas filled the air, and the flies, attracted by the food
and the mule’s excrement, multiplied as the boy repeated to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 451
himself the confidence that his father had whispered in his
ear. “We know that she descends daily to the hidden brook at
the bottom of the ravine. Midway between the bottom and the
top, there is a hidden cave covered with wild fig branches. You
should wait there until you hear her coming down the narrow
path. Do as our ancestors have done to preserve the honor of
our family.”
Selim knew that his father’s words were a command which must
be obeyed, even though uneasiness almost persuaded him to
question the ancient code. So he talked to himself, leaving the
men making sheaths amidst the tall, yellow wheat moving to the
flow of the winds and heading for the ravine to lie in wait. It
was at this point that enormous strength was needed to sever
family ties. The tender memories he had from his sister’s birth
to her first steps to her first dress on Sunday morning, not to
mention their constant companionship growing up together, were
all erased in obeisance to the blind force that ruled in the
village and from which there was no escape.
Selim turned his head, taking in the mule ceaselessly
switching its tail and the men taking refuge beneath an almond
tree from the burning sun. They all seemed unaware of the
futility of their circumstances, condemned by fate as they were
to toil until their last breath, only to accept the inevitable
defeat that awaited them at the end of their journey. Selim
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 452
caught a glimpse of his father’s face and felt he noticed in
his eyes the look of pain, that inner distress so often present
in him at the end of a day’s work, born of the knowledge that
all could be washed away by a heavy downpour destroying the
tender shoots barely holding to the earth. It was the last time
he was to see his father alive. Wherever he went, Selim was to
struggle to keep together in his mind the image of that distant
afternoon when the world he had known until then had quickly
come to an end.
“That was the beginning of the walk uphill to the train
station that still continues to this day. A curse for all those
born in this village,” the elders recounted from generation to
generation. In times of need, they told the young men to go
across the high seas where “the earth is as black as the pulp
that remains from the grinding of the olives and the air is as
soft as the breeze we feel in the first days of spring.”
“They have left Sheshi to find a better future for
themselves,” the mother would confess when her neighbors first
wondered and then inquired openly about Maria and Selim’s
absence. The news spread quickly to all four corners of the
village until it even reached those on the other side of the
brown hills, where nothing would grow because of the wind and
the heat from the burning sun. There the unrelenting winds blew
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 453
away what little soil there was, exposing massive brown stones,
which grew in size with every passing season.
With the children gone, the parents grew ever more taciturn,
avoiding each other unless in the presence of their neighbors.
The mother no longer rose before sunrise to make the beds,
clear the house of all the fireflies, and water the many
begonias she kept in front. Her daughter’s room was left just
as it had been that fateful morning, when she had felt
compelled to safeguard the honor of her family from the
everlasting stain. Gone forever were the innocent smiles and
laughter of the two children as they sat at the table awaiting
their father’s return, announced by the barking dog which
always preceded his master. Gone, too, was the procession of
springs the mother had counted in her daughter’s eyes until the
realization, one early evening as they cleared the dinner
table, that she was at the threshold of becoming a woman. She
had raised this daughter, as her mother had taught her, to fear
God and to follow the rules handed down from the founders of
the village.
Her Maria had always been drawn to the gentle things in
nature. The mother still recalled how this baby, upon opening
her eyes at birth, had fixed them upon the fresh bouquet of
violets which her husband had gathered from the bottom of the
ravine where the clear waters flowed gently, cradling the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 454
blossoms along its banks. Realizing the special attraction that
beautiful things had for her daughter, the mother constantly
recalled the elders’ warning about the dangers that lurk behind
things that please the senses. “Avoid them as you become aware,
for no human eyes can escape their curse.”
The mother had lived her life with that constant fear, trying
to be the mother she was expected to be and, at the same time
to prepare her daughter to fulfill her own duties as a mother,
in turn. She watched her children as a queen bee monitors her
hive. Consequently, her husband knew that his home was well
protected as, morning after morning, he took the same road to
the fields where he pushed himself to work harder so that his
family would not be in want. The husband and wife understood
each other so well that, even in their happiest moments they
had exchanged very few words. But now the silence between them
had become like an open wound, unlikely to ever assuage the
burning pain of memory. Each had entered the black cave of no
return.
“Yesterday I had my two children with me,” Emira confided to
her mother, looking straight at the picture that was embedded
in the center of the marble tomb that carried her name, dates
of birth and death and her best qualities. “Now my nest is
empty, and looking at my husband has become a burden.” This was
the only time that Emira would permit her eyes to fill with
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 455
tears; even so, she quickly wiped them, fearful that someone
would see her. Always dressed in black, distracted by nothing
around her, she walked through the village alone, like an image
of the past, an icon, stern and unmoved. She seemed to be just
the pillar that a husband would want at home, the strong
character that a father would wish for in a daughter. For just
this reason no one ever questioned the sudden disappearance of
her two children; rather, they simply accepted the explanation
that Emira had given to them only once.
Inside Emira, however, guilt was taking its toll. “Go down to
the cave of the eternal rain and place in the pool of water
your most valuable possession,” she was told by the eldest of
the women who seemed to have lived forever and whose chimney
constantly smoked even though the villagers knew full well that
she had no wood. From that day on, Emira descended daily to the
cave, returning just before her husband Idriti would pack the
mule with dried wood and prepare to take the road home. By now,
her neighbors and her husband, who had grown accustomed to
leaving Emira with her thoughts, were beginning to notice
physical changes in the woman.
In a matter of weeks, Emira had returned to the beauty of her
youth, acquiring the look that a woman assumes only when she is
about to give birth. The word quickly spread through every
house in the village: “Emira can feed every hungry child in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 456
Sheshi.” Mothers who did not want to see their children cry in
pain flocked to her house, begging her to feed their babies. It
was then that Idriti, fully came to understand the terrible
punishment that had been allotted to his wife. They ceased to
talk altogether, nor even to eat at the same table. Emira was
simply too busy to pay any attention to her husband, who, at
times, did not even bother to return home from the fields.
Weather permitting, he would spend the night inside the cave
which his great-grandfather had dug at the bottom of the
mountain.
Idriti took to having conversations with himself, for fear of
forgetting his own name. He did that for many years until,
early one morning as he readied himself to go to the fields
before sunrise, he could not remember the road to take. For the
rest of his many days, and to the surprise of those in Sheshi
who greeted him out of pity as he sat on the wooden bench
facing the fountain, he responded repeatedly that his son Selim
was going to return home any day. The street cleaner, always
the first to rise, was the one who found Idriti dead one cold
October morning. The old man was completely covered with dead
leaves, his chin resting on his wooden cane. By the time they
took him home, it was almost noon, and the small icicles which
had formed in his mustache had melted away. Emira did not
recognize him and refused to let the town authorities place the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 457
body in the center of the house as tradition demanded. But, in
taking pity on the poor man, whom she thought might be a
distant relative, she relented, preparing the table in the
middle of the house and opening the door to the whole village
to come and pay respects to the wanderer. She did not even
object when the people who had brought him to her house buried
the body in one of the empty tombs between her mother and
father.
Upon returning home, a strange sensation of loss invaded
Emira’s memories, but she made little of it, thinking more of
the need to get rid of the smell of death that had penetrated
the porous old plaster walls. For days she did nothing other
than scrub those walls with holy water mixed with dried
rosemary leaves. Although the odor seemed to disappear during
the day, it returned the minute the sun set behind the seven
hills that were visible from her balcony. Emira learned, after
many years, to live with the odor. It even came to keep her
company during the long winter days with the door shut.
Emira ventured out of the house only to gather a few stumps
of wood to keep herself warm. In the dead of winter, a quick
stroke of the brush in her mind suddenly made her aware that
the odor was her husband’s. It had been the first thing she had
noticed at their initial meeting at the crossroads of the
winding brook that late afternoon as she was returning home
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 458
with a basketful of the red tomatoes she had picked. Idriti had
been walking slowly, carrying a branch from which a cloth was
hanging. She had taken pity on him, although not without some
apprehension; she had offered him a few tomatoes and her last
slice of bread.
In Idriti’s eyes, that day, Emira had seen her own present
and future: two children coming and going, as if pushed forward
and then quickly pulled back by an unforgiving force; her hair
changing color; and the wanderer himself, aged and
unrecognizable on his customary bench overlooking the fountain
in the village square. Yet Idriti had barely thanked her for
her kindness as he turned to take the road that led to the
Abbey of the Two Lakes.
Years later, at the village’s feast of Saint Rock, Emiria saw
Idriti again, clean-shaven and wearing a jacket buttoned from
the neck down to the waist. He had come down from the Seven
Mountains after years of logging to save enough to start
thinking of a home to which he could return after work. Without
speaking to Emira, he inquired about her family from the
shoemaker working outside his shop on one of the streets that
lead to the main square. Idriti never forgot the dark blue
color of the sky, illuminated with thousands of lights in the
shapes of stars and flowers. Taking off his left shoe, he asked
the shoemaker to get rid of the nail that had penetrated inside
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 459
the shoe. For days Idriti had walked with blisters. The
shoemaker took the shoe and, without looking for the nail,
began to hammer the inside of the heel, smoothing it out with
his fingers. “The air is certainly soft tonight,” Idriti
hastened to say as the shoemaker was handing him the shoe. He
added, “The soft air never fails to come, even on the hottest
days of July when the musty winds from the South cover
everything with the finest dust of the Sahara Desert.”
The pain in his left foot did not go away. In fact, the nail
had opened a wider wound that bled slowly through his socks.
Idriti applied three bay leaves to the wound, as he had been
directed to do, but nothing seemed to work. Not long after, he
came to know that the bleeding would lessen when he thought of
Emira. He began to lose sleep, confusing the hours of the night
with those of the day. The people in Sheshi saw him wander
through every street and alley and then stop beneath each
window, hoping to see Emira behind the glass. He stayed for
hours in front of the main fountain waiting to see in every
woman coming to fill her jug with fresh water the face of the
one he had seen that distant afternoon.
Outside their homes, knitting and mending the clothes for the
coming winter, the women of the village whispered to each other
without raising their eyes about the ailment that was consuming
Idriti. “He is dying of love for Emira. Someone should point
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 460
out the house to him.” But the village had changed more quickly
than its inhabitants could imagine, and Idriti’s love for Emira
could not find respite. It only grew stronger. By now, even the
young children, who had never experienced much pain, knew that
it was just a matter of time before they would hear the bells
from the Church of the Dead at the end of the square ringing to
announce the end of the battle against the forces of love.
Yet, it was not to be. Idriti’s desire for the woman who had
given him that red fruit and the slice of bread made him even
more determined to keep on searching for her. He was the first
to wake up in the morning, even beating the sun; in the
evening, he knew precisely when the moon reached its maximum
visibility. Unbeknownst to them, the people around Idriti were
growing older by the hour, their foreheads filling with
wrinkles and their backs becoming bent. But Idriti, who had
become for them “the stranger in love,” grew younger and
younger. Not long after, someone who had observed the young
stranger closely reached a lucid conclusion that was to change
forever the behavior of Sheshi’s people, especially those who
were approaching middle-age. “Love can stop the aging process
of the internal organs.”
At first, no one seemed impressed by this probing
observation, simply because it had come from the town fool,
Burariki. In just a few months, however, the whole village was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 461
able to see that Burariki himself appeared to have reversed the
aging process. He was able to feel again the love his own
mother had tenderly bestowed upon him when she discovered that
her son was being systematically isolated and mocked by others
his age because he had stopped growing. Burariki’s eyes filled
with tears as he now fully understood the compassion his mother
had felt for him; and those tears gradually restored his skin
to its natural texture. Burariki had returned to puberty.
In days the people of Sheshi were busy searching for love.
They wrote endless love poems in which, piercing through the
smallest detail in the beauty of nature, they opened a universe
never seen before. Others mixed all kinds of wild flowers found
in the hidden ravines at the very top of the Seven Mountains to
create love inhalers. A single sniff caused them to shed tears
of loneliness for days, but not to rejuvenate their skin. They
had not found the formula. The decision was made to force
Burariki to reveal his secret. In vain did he try to tell them
that he knew of no secret he could share with them. The strain
was too much for Burariki; he died just before dawn after
singing the most melancholy song ever heard in the village.
That morning the men did not go to the fields. The beasts of
burden were not taken to the fountain to quench their thirst.
The mothers warned their children and the wives warned their
husbands not to venture outside their homes. “Someone is going
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 462
to pay for Burariki’s death.” It was the same warning uttered
by all the other women in the village. The priest, Prefti
Vlasi, had seen Burariki’s lacerated body in his dreams. In the
morning he walked to his one-room home adjacent to the Church
of Shënkoli and closed his wide-open eyes, frightened by no
fear he could explain. Prefti Vlasi put on his full regalia,
sprinkled the corpse with holy water and, bearing the Holy Book
in his right hand, walked through the empty streets of the
village with the body on his shoulders. For the first time, he
heard the silence mantling Sheshi and saw its face.
The next day, the priest warned his congregation that silence
had sprouted in the village and was taking up residence in
every household. The faithful listened attentively but they
could not hide their conviction that the priest had lost his
mind. “He should not have gone out to offer the last sacrament
to the town fool,” commented some of the men. “His soul must
have lodged inside that of the priest,” added others. In
everyone’s mind, Prefti Vlasi was lost. It was only a matter of
time before they would be without a holy official. It was the
beginning of a more vengeful curse.
Two weeks after the incident, the first departure by a group
of young men from Sheshi took place. The train station was
refurbished and new topsoil was added to the two gardens on
each side of the structure. The stone steps leading to the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 463
station from the center of Sheshi were re-pointed with fresh
cement. “The young of the village will be made to wander
throughout the four corners of the world unless those who
caused the death of Burariki come forward and bury him
underneath the altar of the main church,” said the elders. No
one paid heed to them. To the church official it was a
sacrilege to grant eternal repose to someone who had broken the
cycle of life.
The summer months went by and not a drop of rain had fallen.
The earth had turned into stone and the sun was busy sucking
the nourishment out of every root. “This year even more people
will be leaving Sheshi. We can’t keep on feeding wild flowers
and chicory to our children,” the women lamented. The landless
were making preparations for the planting season when they were
told by the landowners that they would not be needed. Every
week a home would lose its occupants and a relative would come
to padlock it. Those who left hoped one day to return to
reclaim their homes. Deep down, however, they nourished a
charred anger against those remaining behind and an awareness
of their debility in the eyes of fate.
At the train station, the people leaving paced back and forth
on the platform. The station master, with murky gray hair, was
adding their names to the long register of departing
passengers. Most, immersed in their fear and sense of loss, did
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 464
not even look back from the carriage window to take a last look
at the village that had given them a reason to leave and to
hope for a better life.
The road to the train station became an unending procession
as the drought worsened. Still no one had taken the initiative
to begin the process of reburial of Burariki, despite the
elders’ many promptings to the authorities. The heat, at times
accompanied by strong winds carrying the sands of the Sahara,
scarred the whitewashed walls of the houses. Each morning, it
was obvious that the village had accumulated another layer of
sand. In some places, the mounds of glittering brown dust even
prevented the people from leaving their homes. “If this
continues,” Mama Luza said to her husband, “we will be
burrowing like rats.” They were the last couple to have
remained in the lowest part of Sheshi where it had all begun
the year the founders, with their white caps and golden
moustaches, arrived from where the sun rises carrying with them
the blackened icon of the Virgin of Constantinople. Mama Luza
and her husband, Zini, had no place to go, for they had had no
contacts with the people on the other side of the green
mountains for as long as they could remember. Their voices
reached into the sounds of the cave of the snake, speaking a
language that few in the village recognized. Together they had
overcome droughts and persecutions, diseases and decay. Nothing
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 465
had forced them to leave their home. Bent by the years, they
had begun the ritual of reburying their only son, whose age
they had forgotten on the day he wandered outside the home,
attracted by the smell of the yellow flowers that bloom in the
first week of March. Mama Luza and Zini had warned their son
not to be tempted by the aroma and not to look, during that
week, into the eyes of any woman. Mama Luza was to remember
that fateful day till the end of time.
On that morning, the sun had risen from the flat hills
brighter than ever. Her son had left the house after shaving
for the first time with a knife he had been sharpening for
weeks. She had watched Maurizio as any mother would have done
on the day she discovered that her child was no longer a child
but a man ready to walk on his own searching for the invisible
path as the others had done before him. Yet, more than just his
sudden maturity distressed her.
Maurizio had looked like the
angel who stood at the top of the picture of the Virgin Mary
over Mama Luna’s bed. Strangely enough, that morning Mama Luza
was sure that a halo hovered over her son’s head; it had
followed him wherever he moved as he tried to shave with a
trembling hand. Using the sleeve of her blouse to quickly wipe
the tears that filled her eyes, Mama Luza became filled with a
willful anger, but there was nothing she could do against the
premonition of disaster that had taken hold of her, for she had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 466
been able to divine the intentions that her son hoped to
conceal.
“I really need you to stay home today to help me decant the
last jug of wine,” Mama Luza urged even as she realized that
this was not the best excuse for keeping her son at home. “If
you want to decant the wine, I will do it when I return this
afternoon. I intend to be home before the sun falls behind the
tallest of the seven mountains,” he had protested, hoping to
lessen his mother’s apparent anxiety. Although he had sensed
her apprehension, he had been unable to quell the compelling
urge to go into the square which had seized him inexorably
since early morning.
Bidding his mother adieu, Mauruzi stepped out of the house.
The sun shone brightly and the chirping of the birds already
filled the air. On the rooftops, the pigeons, which, as a
child, he had noticed usually stayed together, now stood alone
with their necks hidden among their feathers. “It must be the
heat,” Mauruzi thought as he unbuttoned the collar of the red
shirt which his mother had ironed so carefully the night
before, not wanting sweat to soil it. Nothing must spoil the
exceptionally bright day that lay before him.
The few neighbors who saw him all dressed in his best could
not believe the change in the demeanor of the one whom their
husbands called “the gentle soul.” As he walked, Mauruzi barely
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 467
touched the roughness of the stones on the narrow road that led
to the main square. His presence reawakened in each woman the
deep, secretive feelings she had had at a tender age…feelings
which her mother had admonished her not to reveal to anyone,
particularly to her husband-to-be. This intimate feeling of
pleasure became pure pain in the late hours of the afternoon,
the very time when Mauruzi felt an unbearable weight on the
back of his neck. He tried to open his eyes but could not. The
intense light became pitch dark. Unable to move his legs, he
considered sitting down to rest for awhile.
The elders, who had come down to the square at sunset to take
their accustomed place on the bench in front of the fountain,
found Mauruzi with his neck dripping blood. People remember,
even to this day, the amber color that had settled over the
horizon. “The souls who dwell over the clouds covering the
mountains are shedding tears of pain,” the elders told everyone
in the village that evening. The deep wound on the back of
Mauruzi’s head was still spilling the last drops of blood into
the red pool that submerged his eyes.
The news spread quickly, of course, but the one who had felt
it before anyone else was Mama Luza. As the sun spread into
white rays over the pine trees in front of the clothesline, she
felt a sharp pain against her navel. It was the same pain she
had experienced when her grandmother informed her that she was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 468
bearing a child. She had not divulged this news to her husband
that evening for fear that it may be false alarm, but as the
pain persisted, she could hide it no longer. “You are going to
be a father,” she had said as Zini prepared to leave for the
fields with the mule laden with the tools and the sack of hay.
“I know,” he had replied, without turning to look into her
eyes, even though she desired so much to meet his glance and
feel more assured of her new status. “I could see it in your
face. It is written all over you.”
How was she now to give her husband the news of their son’s
death? She changed her clothes, dressing in the black garments
which her mother and grandmother had worn before her. She went
to gather her son’s blood and to bury it deep in the earth,
where no animal could smell it. The few people who followed her
from the house saw the anger in her eyes. She cursed the whole
village to wander eternally the four corners of the earth
without ever finding peace of mind.
The body brought to her home by the authorities remained on
top of the table in the only room for three days. There was
neither mass nor the sprinkling of holy water because the
priest lay in bed with a burning fever, drinking barrels of
water that tasted to him like rice wine. Thus the father slung
his son’s body over his shoulders and took the road to the
cemetery as the whole village was buried deep in sleep. He laid
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 469
the body of his son between his mother and father so that he
would not feel the loneliness of the place or the humidity of
the winter nights. He added no name, respecting their privacy
as in the years he had stayed with them.
The death of their only son caused the couple to drift apart.
Each found solace in the little things that make one forget,
for awhile, the growing pain inside. But the other villagers
soon forgot the terrible death of the young man who had known
love to exist, but who had been killed before he could share
his feelings with them. At Mama Luza’s home, the logs stopped
burning in the fireplace. Now the young men of Sheshi no longer
sat around it to hear the elders speak of those who had come
from where the sun rises and from whom they themselves had
learned. Nor did they learn to master the skills of making
suits or fashioning painted leather shoes so soft as to make
those who wore them feel as if they walked on cotton balls.
Even the secret of making bread was lost in just a few
seasons. The fields dried out with the persistent droughts that
ensued a week after the death of Mauruzi. The seeds saved for
the long winters in the old caves at the end of the village had
run out. Half of the harvest had been eaten by dark brown
rodents never before spotted in any of the barns around the
village center.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 470
But no one seemed to heed the warning of terrible days to
come in the mumblings of the village elders as they rested on
the secular seats in front of the ancient stone fountain.
Unexplained signs appeared and disappeared from the sky much
faster than they ever had before. The elders could not get a
second look at what was happening, so they resigned themselves
to their intimations of foreboding as leaves in autumn, each
following the other at the mercy of the cold winds from the
north side of the seven mountains. And the cold days came with
a vengeance, keeping the old men inside their homes and
inflicting upon those who ventured out burning patches that
smelled of salt for the remaining winter months. Fewer and
fewer people could be seen walking on the streets. It seemed
that the village had gone to sleep with no one able to predict
when or if it would ever reawaken.
The four churches that stood on each of the corners of the
Sheshi smelled of fungus. The cement turned to dust scattered
throughout by the wind and the sands that never failed to come
from the seas to the south. The church bells ceased to be heard
and the swallows were suddenly replaced by larger dark birds
that preyed on the brown rats which now owned the dark alleys
and the sewage lines beneath the square.
Mama Luza and her husband sat upon their respective wooden
chairs and rarely spoke. They had learned to live on the few
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 471
dried beans that each had saved with the patience of ants and
the assiduousness of squirrels. The little water they needed to
keep their blood thin they gathered from the incisions in the
cave from which their home had been carved.
Such silence and distance had never been felt in Sheshi. Even
now as I recall that legend of old, I can still feel the
weighty stillness that had settled inside my eyes on the day we
left the village. The pain of saying good-bye at the train
station was unbearable. Each one of us sensed that the
departure was not shared by those who remained in Sheshi.
Mothers would not let go of their sons without knowing where
they might end. Their pleas to stay at home and wait for the
rains to come went unheard. “This place has been cursed until
it exists no more.” Of course, the women understood their
children’s need to break away from that curse, but the fear of
never seeing them again did not allow those mothers to
visualize their young sons’ inner desire to climb the hill that
led to the train station.
The light from the box shone more and more brightly, opening
the chain of time where all those faces in the photographs were
of the same face but for a few superficial variations. It took
the few books covered with dust from the crumbling wall,
knowing that I was going into a world where everything moved
more quickly than anything I had observed up to that very
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 472
moment. The many lives and secrets of Sheshi remained guarded
inside the box. The key to it had fallen among the pile of
bricks that had held our tenement building together.
I arrived at school and proceeded through many of its
buildings in search of the one where I would take my courses. I
had found a room off-campus in a wooden frame home owned by an
elderly Hungarian couple who had managed to escape from a
revolution no one had ever heard of, for those who actually
knew of its existence made sure to prove that it had never
happened. The elderly couple did not allow any noise other than
gentle breathing when everyone was asleep. The attic room
became my hiding place. From its only window I could see the
sun rise, only to be replaced by the moon with its many
different shapes in a cloudless sky. I had the advantage of
seeing things the way the many birds saw them, simultaneously
from all four directions. I could see what was rarely visible
to those who walked below, head down. At night, just before
sunset, I sat with a few other students who protected
themselves with an intellectual coat of arms as impenetrable as
the scholar seated in front of us, who levitated with every
self-serving expression emanating from the flow of water at its
base. The pool of water, still fresh in my memories, became my
refuge during the long hours of pretended learning.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 473
I began to feel the pain of loneliness corroding my bones,
aggravated, especially, by those long rainy nights in late
autumn when the putrid smell of dead leaves invaded the air one
breathed. I was determined not to succumb to the nauseating
effect of the clock that stood on top of the writing desk. I
immersed myself totally in the books that were required in each
class. The world I discovered in those books was completely
disconnected from the one each of us was forced to live in with
the others. I feared losing the key to the memories of Sheshi
and to those moments I had spent with my family at the dinner
table. As the bread was sliced and the prayers were begun, eyes
filled with the mist of years past. Each sound was replete with
meanings understood by all even as they, with a slight movement
of the head, passed the still warm sliced bread from head of
the table down.
From the one window of my room I could count a few people
going in and out of the recently opened coffee shop still
bedecked with starry flags. The owner seemed to be a middleaged person with a thick black moustache. He opened the place
promptly at six in the morning and, illuminating a small red
light, closed it at ten at night. No more than five customers
frequented the place. Among them was an old woman with swollen
legs who never failed to look towards my window before entering
the shop. The pigeons gathered outside the place followed her
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 474
footsteps faithfully because she gave them a few crumbs and a
faint smile, welcoming their presence just as she silenced
every other sound around her. She lifted her head to watch the
school children cross the street, studying their steps with the
inquisitiveness of those who suddenly find themselves in
unfamiliar places. The woman went in and out of the coffee
shop, carrying nothing more than a discarded newspaper. She
would spend the rest of the day waiting for the streets to
empty and with her few belongings move into the place where she
would spend the night.
One day I came face to face with the wandering woman. “You
are the one who always stares at the street from the top window
of the wooden house,” she said to me with watery, unclear eyes
which hid a dense darkness behind the rays. The hollow silence
that invaded the street each night was only interrupted by the
barking of a few stray dogs lying against the garbage cans. The
moon, about to begin its ascent over the tall buildings, burned
red, discharging wave after wave of gray vapors. She said no
more. Without turning her head, she continued to move away from
the coffee shop toward one of the dogs, who lifted his head as
he saw his mistress approach the pack. Together they entered
the space of shadows.
Winter had silently made its appearance. A cold wet wind
stripped the trees of their few leaves. The sky was a constant
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 475
gray which seemed determined to last forever. The evening cold
kept every door and window shut. I began to spend long hours in
the school library. The reading room was mostly empty, with the
exception of those who came in and out after going through the
daily paper. The librarian, with his noticeably thick glasses,
kept records of the books and names of those who checked them
out. Since each student had been told to report any suspicious
activity, everyone sought to avoid becoming self-accusatory in
the eyes of the omnipresent observers. The campus had been
injected with a potent medicine; because the guilty could mix
so easily with the innocent, everyone was terrified.
Soon enough the men in uniform developed the impulse to
strike back at the unconcerned. The self-proclaimed “defenders
of national values” were under the illusion that all others,
especially the uninformed, were the enemy of the state. As
welcome as an unexpected summer shower was the willingness with
which ordinary citizens were quickly persuaded to commit
atrocities against their neighbors. During that season the
converts put up ubiquitous posters vilifying those who would
dare to change “our way of life.”
The early days of winter brought drizzle and fog. Those who
dared to go emerge from their cubicles walked as if floating on
a wet, grayish mist. It drizzled day and night and the air
smelled of decayed wood. On one such day (I cannot recall the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 476
precise day or month) the landlord handed me a sealed envelope.
His face ashen, he spoke of two tall men wearing black
raincoats and hats of similar color who had given him the
letter after a long list of questions. The fear written on his
face told me that he was remembering his persecution and escape
from the Hungarian Uprising, and, in fact, he murmured “We
moved from alley to alley like rats during the night until we
reached the outer walls of the city.”
I assured the landlord that I had done nothing that could
pose a threat to his recently-won security in the New Land.
Looking into his frightened eyes, I decided thereupon to look
for another place as soon as I cleared the matter at the police
station. I arrived at the three-story building at the appointed
time, hoping to resolve the situation before the afternoon
class on the north side of the campus. In spite of being
located between two ruined textile factories surrounded by
abandoned train tracks, the police station itself sat in the
midst of an emerald lawn upon which a peacock strutted, fanning
its magnificent tail. Behind the factories was a row of
dilapidated houses where some elders sat on the stoops and
others stood behind weather-beaten windows, apparently still
hoping for better days.
A sergeant of indeterminate age rocked back and forth in a
reclining chair answering one phone call after another. I was
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 477
told to go to the office with no number on the door at the end
of the hall. Whispers floated about in the darkened corridor as
I knocked on the door, which opened and closed automatically.
I entered the room uneasily, noting the smell of entrenched
mold. There was no furniture at all, save for one chair and a
table. The wide lamp hanging over it revealed patches of
coagulated blood. Fighting back a sensation of encroaching
asphyxiation, I thought “Sooner or later someone will have to
come and open the door.” It was not to be for hours or perhaps
even days.
The person, whose face I was never to see, came after the
bright hanging light had been turned directly into my eyes,
totally blinding me. The piercing, intimidating voice that
firmly settled into the room was one I had heard before, but I
could not trace it no matter how hard I tried. It was too
familiar for me to be mistaken, yet I searched my mind
fruitlessly through all the places I could recall, from
Father’s barber shop on Third Avenue to the marble post office
by the river front. I thought of the voices of the people with
whom I had come in contact at the university and of those who
had greeted us on the ship before disembarking. Those had been
special sounds which I saved covetously in my mind, determined
never to forget them.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 478
I was ordered to sit with my eyes wide open. The light,
shining even more intensely than before, formed a circle around
me. The voice reached me in waves, coming from various areas of
the dark surroundings, but its pitch was keen, chiseling my
hearing like a knife on a piece of wood. “Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’
to the questions,” it commanded with a callous, dry bark. The
true function of the room was finally taking shape. The worms
hidden inside the flowers had found their way out of the tunnel
and had begun to gnaw at the dreams of all those who had dared
to take on the vastness of the ocean. It was their punishment.
Tuliuci’s words from the tailor shop came back to me. “Behind
the hand-out, there are thousands of tentacles with scouring
fingernails. Those who managed to escape the torture are fewer
than can be counted on one hand. In Sheshi, only one lived to
tell about his ordeal, and no one believed a word he had to
say. It takes a special person to be able to see through the
pleasurable images that are placed in front of people to
deceive them.”
All Tuliuci’s warnings, unclear under the hot sun of those
distant afternoons, were becoming comprehensible in front of my
unveiled eyes. The menacing voice, which by now had acquired
the putrid smell of the mold clinging to the wet walls, was
coming closer and closer to my chair. “We are going to be here
for as long as it takes for me to get the proper and complete
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 479
answers to all the questions that I have in front of me.” That
was the last statement I could vouch for having fully heard
before my mind began to search for more pleasant places through
the bridge of memories. “You are accused of having read the
following books.” The voice went over the list without
excluding the smallest detail of title, author, content and
place of publication. “The list has been verified by two
witnesses: the librarian and a citizen who sat across from you
at another table in the reading room.”
The day we left Sheshi for the city by the sea, she came to
stand under the balcony. I could feel her presence and hear the
pounding of her heart from my place on the mezzanine. Mother
was still placing a few more things into the suitcase. She did
not say a word and even pretended not to see me or hear the
squeaking of the door as I unlocked it. The night was chilly
and the sky a dark blue with a canopy of stars. Her hand was
warm and soft, and it felt much smaller than ever before. I had
held those hands so many times as we walked from the fields
moving to the sound of the crickets and seizing as many of the
sun’s rays as we could hold in our tight fists. We waited
silently for the first rays of the sunrise to come down from
the pinnacles of the seven mountains. “I’ll be back,” I
remember telling her. It was what she had come to hear for,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 480
soon after placing her head on my forehead, she vanished from
where the white streak of the sun did not reach.
“Do you deny having taken the books mentioned from the upper
level shelves of the library? Just answer with a simple nod.
You are forbidden to speak.” Had the girl sitting across the
table followed me to the upper level? I could swear she had
never moved from the place she occupied. Could I be mistaken? I
decided to nod “yes” so as to speed up the interrogation that
was beginning to feel utterly absurd. Could it be that I was
dreaming all this? I reached for the contours of the chair to
ascertain that I was actually in the place where the person
blinding me with the light was probing for answers. “You failed
to let the librarian know why you had chosen those books to
read. The offense calls for severe punishment.”
This last word produced a feeling of release from the burden
I was being forced to endure. I sensed a strange pleasure
making its way from deep recesses and moving through the pores
of my fingers. I hesitated to answer, not knowing what to say.
“I was never made aware of the list of forbidden books,” I
muttered. “I will remind you one last time about answering with
a nod of your head.” The air in the room was completely fetid.
A nauseating stench was progressively taking hold of the space,
as a slimy glue began seeping through the walls. The light must
have been brighter, for the pain was unbearable.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 481
I had lost the way to Sheshi. I must have stopped breathing
when I no longer could feel the wooden floor with my feet. My
fingers had become numb. I opened my eyes even wider and found
myself in a corner, not certain if I were in the same room. The
floor smelled of urine, and the roaches were busily scuttling
up and down the walls searching frantically for food that was
nowhere to be had. The shirt I remembered wearing that morning
was soaked with sweat. I tried to move but discovered that I
was tied to the chair like a wounded animal awaiting a final
blow from an unseen predator. The walls had grown taller and
were now filled with a green jelly making its way towards the
floor. “When will they come to release me?” As the darkness
inside the room grew heavier until it felt like a stone over my
chest, I began to pant for air. Not a sound could I hear. The
butterflies were busily flying from flower to flower. The
petals, softly bending beneath their scant weight, twinkled
with the breeze. The colors of the season dove into the few
clouds which hesitated, uncertain which direction to take.
Soon it would be time for the next interrogation. And,
indeed, the time had arrived. The light was even brighter. My
eyes had no defense against it. The interrogator’s voice
sounded like thousands of knives sharpening one another. This
time I decided not to answer at all. The sun will soon rise and
the round noises of millions of insects will cease. The mist is
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 482
slowly lifting, painting in yellow the tree tops, bathing them
in the rays of the sun galloping through a sky of whites and
blues. On the steps of the church in Sheshi, a few children
played with the sound of stones, lifting and pushing them
through the tunnels of their arched fingers resting on the
steps. The square was deserted and almond trees had drawn
circles of shade on the cobblestones. As the sun began its
descent over the tallest of the seven mountains, the men in the
fields gathered their farm tools and began to walk back to the
village. Their desire to reach home shortened the road, and the
olive trees bent their silver leaves to the approaching night.
The pain of the lashes across my back was excruciating, but I
drowned every desire to scream. I felt the blood dripping down
my back, burning its way into the flesh as I was forced back
into the chair. Someone behind me tied my head to the chair. “I
must not make a noise,” I said to myself. The light no longer
pained my eyes. The person at my side threatened to tighten the
belt around my head unless I limited nodded “yes” or “no.” I
must have managed not to answer, since I found myself back in
the corner with my head in a pool of blood. The coldness of the
pavement soothed the wounds. The hunger which I had felt before
being strapped to the chair had vanished. My whole body was
numb and my eyes were swollen shut. “Maybe it is for the best
so I won’t imagine seeing anything as I did before.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 483
“They tell me that you spend days dreaming on the steps of
the Church of the Dead.” “No, Mother, I sit there thinking of
Father across the ocean and waiting for the swallows to bring
news of him from the other side of the seven mountains.”
The tolling of the bells never failed to bring the swallows
to the square; they delighted in chasing the sounds. First just
a few would come. Then, in just a short while, as the pitch
reached higher and higher into the sky, they all flocked
together, swirling about as if frightened by something and then
circling the belfry. I sat there watching them with my heart
pounding so that it threatened to burst from my chest. I
counted and recounted the swallows, even though I knew exactly
how many there were. Some flew faster than others. The larger
ones must have been growing old, for they zigzagged in an
effort to follow the younger ones. The village elders said that
the swallows never stop flying unless they are building their
nests with sand and water beneath the eaves of those houses
facing the sun. I remained there on the church steps until, one
by one, the birds disappeared as the sun began its descent
behind the last of the seven mountains. The streets filled with
silence shed tears for those who walked alone and unseen.
“Do not get caught away from home after dark. The night
belongs to those who lived before us.” The air smelled of
decayed almond leaves, and the sky seeded the earth with the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 484
sounds of angry animals. “They say that a beast can tear the
flesh from any man. People have been snatched by the night owl
and taken to places that no one else could ever find. Or if
they did find them, they never returned.”
I was thinking of Mother’s warnings as I felt the thickening
darkness around me. An intense weakness invaded every muscle of
my body. “I cannot give up now, but the questions he repeats so
endlessly are too precise to be answered. I cannot think of
anything to say.” The pain had turned into a pleasure I had
never felt before. I had lost all notion of time, and I had no
way to determine it, having left my wrist watch and my book at
the front desk as the sergeant had commanded.
The breath of the interrogator who now resumed smelled of
rotten onions. It became clear that he intended to break me. I
was hoping the end of the ordeal would come quickly. Just as I
began to detect streaks of light underneath the dark eaves of
the room, the interrogator, smoking, opened the door just
enough to spy on me, unaware that I could see him. His face was
full of wrinkles. A long moustache divided his jaw from the
upper part of his head. A miniscule person with slanted eyes
and nothing attractive about him, he was the sort of man who
goes through life without ever being noticed.
He looked around the room, scrutinizing every bit of the four
walls. “Don’t let anyone clean this room until I break him,” he
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 485
pretended to admonish someone. Although his words were spoken
in nothing more than a whisper, they sounded like a piercing
roar to my ear, sharpened as it was by apprehension. I was
beginning to see the rationale behind the interrogation. Scum
such as he wanted to enslave anyone who still walked alone
along his path, anyone who could sense the hidden sounds in the
sky. Like millions of ants, people were forced to lower their
eyes to the ground and to count and recount the steps climbed
only to begin again. Others paced back and forth, always
following a straight line, avoiding any deviation. It was all
done in complete silence. Masked men stood along side the long
caravans of dregs I had seen in the streets.
“You have broken one of our basic rules!,” the interrogator
screamed at the top of his lungs the second he sat down. “Admit
it and this ordeal will be over at least for today.” I was able
for the first time to see his whole face. It was deeply
pockmarked and covered with red pimples. I had seen such a face
walk freely among the people in the neighborhood where I rented
the room. How could I have known that these people had been
sent to spy on those who questioned the order of things?
The stench that emanated from the man’s mouth when he spoke
hung like a dark cloud over the room. It was thicker than the
darkness that loomed over me when he turned off the bright
light. “Your legs are swollen,” he observed in a tone that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 486
betrayed the beginning of concern. The pain from my legs was
indeed throbbing from my ankles to my upper jaw, where the
smell had settled. The pain had become my companion. “I’ll give
you all the time you need to come to your senses,” the
interrogator whispered in my ear. “I am not in a hurry. The
more you resist, the more of an enemy you will become to the
association.”
I longed to release a cry from my gut, but the will to resist
it was even stronger. I followed the man’s movements from the
desk to the door. He left it ajar. In the corridor, I imagined
a long line of young people, all in chains and dumbfounded as
they faced the guard behind the glass window. I wished to be
able to warn them of the pain and brutality that awaited each.
“They must also have been brought because of the books they
read.”
The blade of light I had discovered under the wall of
darkness was fading away, probably swallowed by the shadow of
the setting sun. The police station was indeed a detention
center. An incessant procession of trucks, their engines
straining with the same high-pitched whine, could be heard
during the long hours of the night. I reached for any sound
that could be translated into a visual image of the world
beyond the door, but the few I could gather did not add up to
anything. “If only I could close my eyes.” The searing pain
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 487
from my head wound dept me in a constant state of dizziness,
interrupted by flashes of acute awareness.
A new interrogator occasionally came and went from the room
in order to tighten the belt that fastened my head to the
chair. It must have been daybreak when he re-entered, because
the streak of light was bright yellow. He was wore a pressed,
dark uniform, and the stars running up the sides of his
polished boots brought to mind those I had seen at the coffee
shop on the main avenue of the city. I fully remembered handing
him his usual cup of dark coffee with a splash of whiskey. He
had mentioned that the whiskey assuaged the chronic pain he
suffered from a poorly extracted wisdom tooth. That pain must
have been unbearable, for each morning he appeared with swollen
eyes underlined with deep, dark circles. He was a stout man
with heavy features and a forlorn expression that cried out for
help. I could sense from the distant smile that played over his
lips as he sipped his coffee that he was studying which name on
the list before him was to live or die. His was the kind of
smile that one sees on those who have finally come to grips
with the proximity of their own banal demise and wish for
nothing better than to be done with it.
This interrogator pulled up closer than usual in front of me,
convinced that I could not see him. “Last night I had to beat a
young man to death,” he said coldly. “There he was, poor devil,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 488
a miserable figure of a man tied to the chair as you are, his
head falling like a rotten pear onto his chest. His eyes
protruded like two crystal balls bathed in blood.” Out of the
corner of my eye I detected the face of the one behind the
glass window. He had just finished checking the last cell and
was about to take his place to await the fresh delivery of
prisoners. “Even had I wanted to, I could not have helped that
young man,” the interrogator observed, rising to leave the room
without closing the door.
My cell faced that of cell number ten. Inside, the man tied
to the chair had not stirred at all since his interrogator had
left the room and begun to pace up and down the corridor,
peeping inside the cell each time he passed it. He appeared to
be playing some sort of waiting game, but I doubted that the
prisoner could have known at that point what was going on, for
two little piles of charcoal were burning in his crumpled face.
I hoped that the new arrivals would distract his tormentor, but
it did not. He continued to pace back and forth like a hungry
wolf waiting for its prey to stop twitching. I recalled the day
the same man had entered my own cell. “I have orders from my
superiors, and I have no time to waste.” I knew then that he
had meant business.
I learned later that the train station had been converted
into a concentration camp. The police became hunters, going out
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 489
each night to apprehend those who appeared on the list for
reading. Anonymity and codes of silence were instilled in each
precinct officer, and the number of the station was changed
daily so that no one who happened to pass by chance would be
able to identify it.
Outside the cell it must have still been winter. I could feel
the pain in my eardrums that never failed to come with each
snowstorm. The trucks were arriving now more frequently; most
of the prisoners they bore would never leave. Each prisoner was
taken out of his cell only after the bright light had caused
the skin on his face to catch fire, burning his eyes out of
their sockets. This secret society, the name and identity of
which was nowhere to be found, was organized by those who
inhabited the tallest glass skyscraper in the city; they wished
to rid themselves of anyone who opposed their new order. Those
who had been chosen to organize and administer the new society
would have the privilege to communicate in a language stripped
of its meanings and made to travel at the speed of sound with
the push of a button. They strove for an impregnable unity of
mind.
I should not have gotten involved with the prisoner in cell
number ten. His erratic breathing was slowly suffocated by the
silence that reigned in the corridor. The interrogator, cloaked
in his dark uniform, moved in and out of the cell like a snake
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 490
through a keyhole. His prisoner’s resistance clearly rattled
him, disturbing his usual blandness. “I will bend you and dry
your veins even if I have to spend the night here,” he
screamed, probably for my benefit, as well. That night, as I
glanced toward the cell, I noticed a ray of light descending
from the ceiling and brightening the entire room. The face of
the prisoner, thus illuminated, was that of a young child
smiling faintly. The image of that bloodied face called up the
guilt of thousands of years ago, a guilt which could never be
assuaged. The face was like no other, and it was imbued with an
aroma as fresh as the branches of a palm tree standing tall in
the courtyard of an open mosque. But behind that image and that
aroma lay the acrid breath of the interrogator. Upon seeing the
same vision, a scream burst forth from his mouth, only to be
devoured by the viscidity of the walls.
I did not want to see the prisoner dragged from his cell like
a useless rag, his head dangling like a pendulum. “Do you see
what happens to those who do not submit to us?” the
interrogator whispered into my ear, filling the cell with his
acrid breath. I was soaked in sweat and blood. My eyes, like
probing antennae, pierced the heart of the night as more trucks
rumbled toward the station. The interrogator had returned,
revealing his essential posture by walking on all fours. The
hair on his body was long, shiny, and pitch-black. As the line
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 491
of newly arrived prisoners, each with his head lowered and
clinging to a book, began to form, the barely recognizable
interrogator approached me. With words that had more sound than
meaning, he spat, “You are no longer needed here, but know that
we will follow your every movement.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 492
Chapter Ten
I found myself sitting on the stony steps of the Church of
the Dead in Sheshi. The family barber shop was clearly visible
across the square, and the air from the seven mountains smelled
of pine needles bathed in raisins. The whitewashed houses along
the cobblestone streets had not yet shed the green ivy that
clung to their walls, and the begonias which usually hung at
the windows had been placed inside to avoid the cold air of the
night. The sky had been emptied of its companions, who had
flown South ahead of the heavy white clouds that descended from
the Ural Mountains. To the elders in Sheshi, the Urals were the
place where the world begins and ends, biting its own tail as
it searches for a way out.
The light in the café had been turned on; it could be seen
from every house in the village. In just a few hours, the place
would be full of people. With their arrival, the events of the
day would be thoroughly discussed and scrutinized until no
doubt enveloped them. The owner of the café, a heavy-set man,
knew everyone just as Father Vlasi did. He opened the door of
the café and looked into the square, fixing his eyes upon the
steps where I was sitting. Then he glanced at the fountain,
making certain that no woman was still scrubbing her clothes
there. Next he looked at the mountains and breathed a deep sigh
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 493
of relief. “Tonight the clouds will allow the people to sit
outside.”
The village had lost a lot of people; whole families departed
almost every day, going to places no one in the café could find
on any of the old maps. For all the years Aristi had spent
opening and closing the café, with a patience that not even
Father Vlasi had when preparing the altar for Mass, he had not
been able to hear from any of those patrons the reason for
their leaving. “Maybe tonight someone will hint at a reason.”
But they were all so taciturn.
The light outside the door was being swallowed slowly by the
heavy fog descending from the mountains. Aristi took another
look outside. He saw an empty square. “Not one person, not even
the illusion of someone seated outside the barber shop,” he
noticed. The almond trees that lined the path which cut through
the square levitated with the help of the fog. The only audible
sound was that of the fountain. “Tonight, the café will stay
empty; it will be difficult for anyone to find his way up here
in the fog.” The rains carried by the northerly winds had
lasted for months; the leaves on the almond trees dripped black
tears.
Aristi, suffering from extreme loneliness and tired of
sipping coffee by himself, decided to prepare hundreds of signs
to place on all the streets of Sheshi with arrows pointing to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 494
the café. He bathed each sign in aromatic potions with the hope
that the fragrances could carve tunnels through the dense fog
that girded the village from the cemetery to the train station.
He tied a white thread from the door of the café to each street
connecting every house in the village. Aristi was not aware of
having ventured beyond the limits of the village. Nor did he
know that on that late fall evening, deep inside the fog, he
was to find the entrance to the world of memories.
It was the time when the white flakes played hide and seek
with the soft breeze of the last days of December. Here and
there piles of snow hid among the tall yellow grass, small
islands of previous lives forgotten by the long days of the
coming winter. It would be one of those long, special times
such as those which come only once and are difficult to erase
from one’s mind. The village had not been named yet. The
strongest of the men had just placed the last stone on the new
fountain facing the square. It was to bring water from the
underground lakes of the seven mountains. The old caves on the
side of the cliff facing the sun had been sealed and numbered
according to the shape of each entrance. A few of the old
inhabitants had refused to leave, finding it impossible to
undertake the long journey half way up the mountain, citing
acute arthritis and a need for the humid air that facilitated
their breathing within the caves.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 495
Aristi felt unequivocally youthful, his legs belying his
walks up and down the gorges at the bottom of the village. The
air was full of old and new voices. The dirt roads that led to
the fields were alive with mules and donkeys coming back from
the long day of hard work under the baking sun. Above, the
swallows dipped in and out of the silence left behind in the
wheat fields. The café owner observed the sun pulling towards
it the remaining mist teeming with life while it urged the
stars to disseminate sleep. The children were chasing the red
butterflies changing into fireflies as streaks of darkness
obscured every alley of the village. Aristi hastened to reach
the house he remembered having been described in detail every
night next to his grandmother’s fireplace. In the distance, a
lonely light in shape of a pinecone was still flickering from
the front door of that house.
Inside, the women were busy kneading the wheat flour
together with a few boiled potatoes saved from the last
harvest. “We are making bread to feed the long line of people
coming to the village from the road of the Chapel of the
Virgin of Constantinople,” said the eldest of the women.
Incense was burning in copper pots and a cross was incised in
the round dough. The cinders in the oven soon performed the
miracle, filling the one-room house with the timeless odor of
the heart of the grain. It was this other night that Aristi
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 496
tried to remember as he arranged the chairs outside, unaware
that he was the only person in the square. Everyone else had
been taken away by the early evening winds that had been
lurking behind the seven mountains. The women’s cheeks in the
house of the big grandmother acquired a rosy color as the
bread doubled in size, growing totally round and bursting with
life. The matriarch herself was stringing together her beads
on a white thread. She placed a knot after every thirteenth
bead. Aristi sat near her, barely breathing as he watched her
change into so many shapes. He fixed his eyes on the flame
bursting from the burning wood into thousands of sparks.
“It all began,” Aristi recounted later on, “when I
remembered hearing that the sacred snake had returned to the
cave of the sweet waters. The women had awakened finding
themselves alone in the tall wooden beds with the children
half naked and at a loss as to where the fathers had gone. In
just a few years, they could no longer remember what their
husbands had looked like. Those children who felt the need to
see their fathers were urged to undertake the long journey to
the caves of the enchanted maidens who lived inside concave
glass walls that changed into so many different shapes with a
single glimpse, confounding anyone who dared to give look at
them closely. In due time, the women learned the art of
fighting wrinkles by turning them into beauty marks. They
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 497
bathed them in the raindrops they gathered every time velvety
rainbows appeared.
The winter nights grew longer and the days grew colder
than at any other time. Not one of the women dared to show
any fear or doubt concerning the return of the men.
Everything in their homes and in the fields was kept the way
it had been before the disappearance of the men. Those who
had access to the lands beyond the seven mountains through
dreams or hallucinations (caused by eating some special black
mushrooms) were consulted as much as the Virgin of
Constantinople at the crossroad chapel as to the probable
season of their return.
I felt a strong desire, as I leaned against the concrete
railing that protected passersby from slipping into the
gorge, to return to the square and see if anyone had come up
to occupy any of the chairs I had placed in front of the
café. The heavy air made it difficult for me to breathe. From
the homes in the distance I could hear painful laments, but I
could not tell where they were coming from. Nor, from where I
was standing, were any of the homes familiar to me. I could
hear feeble moans making their way out of the old piles of
wood on the side of each home. A distinct odor had settled
above the clay tile roofs. It reminded me of the green shrubs
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 498
with heart-shaped leaves that lined the main walkway to the
cemetery.
The small light I was following as I began to descend into
the heart of the village was no longer there, and the night
was in no hurry to give way to the first streaks of dawn. ‘I
will go back to the home of the big grandmother,’ I murmured
to myself, but the road back was washed away from my mind.
The image of the red sun setting on the side of the olive
groves still burned in my mind as I recollected setting the
tables and chairs outside the café. The empty square with the
water cascading from the mouths of the fountain’s gargoyles
did not bring any bad premonitions to mind.”
Aristi never did come to know why the village had been
completely empty of all the people whom he had known since
his first days at school. And it happened that the urge to
set out the tables and chairs distracted him from noticing
both the tranquility that had descended upon the square and
the absence of the swallows. But Aristi did notice that the
old man who had been leaning with his head on a wooden cane
was no longer there. He solved that riddle with a simple
mental solution. “This is the first time he is late in
claiming his seat.”
Moments later Aristi was to see the avalanche of fog
rolling down from the seven mountains as if pulled by a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 499
thousand horses. “Nothing now,” he thought, “is going to help
the people at the bottom of Sheshi come up to the café.” It
was then that a flash of memory made Aristi look for the
spool of woolen thread that he used every fall during the
days of the dense fog to descend from his home near the train
station down to the main square. He prepared a cup of coffee
for himself and left everything ready for when the others
would be coming, following the thread he intended to extend
from the café to every house in the village.
The red sun had fallen deep below the crooked horizon of
the hills. Behind him, the fog had erased from view the last
houses of the village. In front of him, the road had
multiplied more than three times with each section
crisscrossing over the other. Aristi recalled his fear of
crossroads, which had sprung from what his mother had told him
so many times. “Aristi, you must bless yourself three times
and say the name of Jesus before you cross over. Do not step
on any knotted rope that you might find, nor touch any clay
pot that might be lying there.”
As he paused to choose the right road, Aristi thought of the
shadowy man seated in front of the village barber shop. The
lines of that figure, his legs crossed and his hands on his
head, seemed terribly familiar, but Aristi could not match him
to any of the clients who frequented his café. Yet that shadow
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 500
of a man wore a smile as clear as the stroke of a brush.
Something made Aristi certain that he had seen the smile in
the family photograph that hung behind the front door of his
place.
For all the years that the picture had been there, no one had
ever been able to trace its origin, yet, curiously, each one
who studied it detected a clear resemblance to himself in a
feature here or a gesture there. Aristi was careful not to
argue with any of those who claimed lineage from that
portrait. What he did know for certain was that all the people
in the portrait… from the father with the perfectly trimmed
beard and soft eyes to the mother with her reserved control
over her four children…were alive. While each client saw a
distant relative inside the frame, Aristi was the only one who
had seen tears in the mother’s eyes whenever someone in the
café announced his imminent departure from Sheshi. Still,
Aristi kept this secret to himself, not even revealing it to
his kin in times of uncertainty or after winter nights filled
with terrible dreams that left him inexplicably apprehensive.
“Could it be,” he would ask himself from time to time, “that
the villagers are drawn to the café because of the portrait?”
Even Niku had stopped at the café to glimpse the portrait
the morning he shot his wife three times in the forehead
without spilling a drop of blood. The bullets had gone into
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 501
and out of the skull, leaving three clear openings from which
those who examined the body could see the light of the burning
sun. The day of the shooting was the hottest that anyone could
recall. The sun was baking the rooftops and the wheat stalks
in the fields went up in smoke. “I got my rabbit,” Niku
announced when he stopped in,
not even taking his eyes from
the portrait when the authorities came to arrest him. This
time Aristi noticed that the mother’s dress in the portrait
had changed color. Now she appeared wearing a dark dress and
an embroidered veil over her head and shoulders. Aristi
attributed this change in attire to a trick of his
imagination, which was probably anticipating the funeral and
grief at Niku’s house. But, as he returned home that night,
Aristi debated whether to mention it to his mother. “If she
could only hold a conversation with me,” he thought, “the
nights would not be so long, and the pain of loneliness would
stop gnawing at my bones.”
Aristi felt deeply confused as he continued to walk home. The
road uphill towards the house yielded nothing more than the
cry of unseen cats looking for a place to hide during the
night. Aristi had walked that road so many times, and yet now
the white-washed walls seemed utterly unfamiliar, as if they
were there principally to conceal secrets within their cement.
The balconies on some of the homes looked like cages floating
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 502
over the dark fog, revealing little of the stone walls to
which they were attached.
A dark thought had preoccupied Aristi throughout the evening:
“Of the handful of people in the café this evening, their
faces looked disoriented and forlorn, as if they had arrived
from afar. Even the portrait made a slight noise as it moved a
little to the left, calling everyone’s attention. If Mother is
awake, I will ask her for an explanation.”
This was not to be. Aristi found his mother fast asleep, a
heavy quilt barely covering her knees, when he opened the
door. After placing another log on the hearth, he drew closer
to her, careful not to make the slightest noise that might
disturb her sleep. It was then that Aristi noticed how similar
her features were to those of the woman in the portrait. She
wore the same fearless expression, and her forehead bore
wrinkles that had to have been formed by the same cold wind
that howled through the gorges below the village. In fact, she
looked like an old tree trunk being eaten away by termites.
Apart from that, Aristi realized that his mother’s well of
memories had to be saved before it dried up. He got up to
slice bread from the round loaf kept in the wooden drawer,
thinking to himself that a few figs would do just fine with
it. Just then, his mother lifted her head and drew the quilt
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 503
closer to her chest, saying, “Your distant cousin is back from
the lands across the ocean.”
“I am certain that he would have come to see us if he had
come back. Besides, no one at the café mentioned anyone’s
arrival today.”
“If you want to see him, you’ll find him on the steps in
front of your great-uncle’s barber shop. It is the only place
still living in his mind. He has come to stay, but I fear that
it might be too late.”
Aristi remembered clearly having seen someone seated on the
steps in front of the barber shop, but he had not paid too
much heed because of the fog that had been playing tricks with
his eyes. “If you are really certain of his return, I’ll go
see him as soon as the fog lifts in the morning.”
“By then, he will be at your grandmother’s house above the
cave of the serpent. I have prepared you a bundle of white
thread so that you can find your way back.”
“This was the first time, after so many years, that she had
mentioned the home at the bottom of the village. It was the
place where she could be found wandering Sheshi’s streets
daily, unable to find her way home. At times, the neighbors
would help her; they recognized her clothes, but not what she
said, since she mentioned both names they had never heard
before and “the curse of the serpent.” Although they did not
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 504
pay much attention to what she said, they were perturbed by
the conviction of her words.
“‘Be patient with her,’ Father had said to me the day he left
to join the others beyond the wide ocean. ‘She cannot detach
herself from the memories of her ancestors; she is trying to
save the village with their assistance.’
In his first letter to us, Father spoke of a doctor who could
get into people’s minds by traveling through their dreams and
undoing the chain that tied them to the well of their
memories. “I will work hard to save money and then bring you
over. It is the only way to bring your mother back to us. Do
not be concerned by the passing of time and the distance.
Think only of the day we will be together. It is the end that
counts, not the painful middle of it.”
Daily I remembered Father’s departure as if it had happened
the day before, but I could not envision the uncle to whom
Father referred days before his walk to the train station.
This uncle had left with six other men of the village before I
learned to harvest my memories.
Aristi’s mother, comfortable with the heat that the log was
casting, had fallen asleep again. He stood motionless in front
of her, eagerly waiting for her eyes to open. The overpowering
need to talk to her was robbing him of sleep. That night,
Aristi stayed awake, just as he had done so many times before,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 505
anxious to hear the familiar sounds of the sunlight as it made
its way into the room through the cracks of the balcony. But
something about the night was very different as he glimpsed
the square, taking inventory of every tree that lined the main
street cutting the open space into two perfect semi-circles.
Aristi counted each swallow, making certain that not one was
missing from the bell tower of the Church of the Dead. He was
unable to shake off his discomfort with the fact that, though
only a handful of people had come to the café the previous
night, he had had difficulty recognizing them. They had not
even looked like the people in Sheshi: the earthy color was
missing from their faces, and their features were unlike any
of those that he had seen in the village.
Sensing that the night was going to be long, Aristi
determined to shorten it. He removed from the drawer the copy
of “The Count of Monte Cristo”, fixing his eyes on the pencil
drawing of the seaport on the first page. Aristi had borrowed
the book from his old teacher’s renowned library of fifty-two
volumes; the blue-eyed teacher had once told him that he kept
fifty-two books so as not to forget the number of weeks in a
year. Half-blind, the teacher from the Northern snow mountains
had stocked them alphabetically and then by author, switching
them around at the end of the year.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 506
Aristi’s mother, by this time fully asleep, had reassumed her
childhood looks, as she did every night. Her son lifted her
and placed her on the bed that occupied half of the room
between the balcony and the half-moon shaped brick inlay in
front of the fireplace. She weighed much less than she had on
the previous night. As if they were two wings, her arms
directed him towards the bed. Aristi was not startled, for he
knew that his mother had the power to see beyond things. He
thought of the time she had saved Sheshi from the worst
drought the villagers had ever seen.
Taking a forked twig from the pile of wood she kept
outside the house, she had directed the neighbors to follow
her up the hill towards the train station. By the time they
had reached the old square where the stone chapel of Saint
Ndoni once stood, the line of people who had been following
her stretched from one end of the village to the other. On
that hot afternoon, she had found water where the centennial
fig tree was still growing. The aged tree bore figs as large
as pomegranates. No one picked the fruit, for it was said that
those who ate them would suffer a violent death.
“The elderly of the village were not surprised by Mother’s
find. They could trace her roots to the home of the big mother
who had looked into the eyes of every child in Sheshi and who,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 507
to this very day, could be identified in the color of their
cheeks.”
Now Aristi turned to the second page of “The Count of Monte
Cristo” and attempted to enter its milieu, taking advantage of
the scant light from the flame in the fireplace. But his mind
immediately wandered to the burial of Prefti Vlasi, whose body
had turned to dust as he waited for his sister to come and
rescue him once more from the place he considered the desert
of the soul of humanity. Again, the sight of the stranger on
the steps facing the barber shop further distracted Aristi
from his reading, for the vision filled his heart with a depth
of sadness he had never before experienced. He added another
log to the fire and decided to wait for sunrise. The cold,
damp night outside deepened the sense of foreboding in the
chill complaints of the dozen cats that inhabited the
neighborhood. “If that stranger spends another night on those
steps, he will be coughing blood by morning.”
Aristi rose from his chair to check his mother. She slept on
the high bed that had belonged to the family for ages. He was
astonished to notice how much she looked like a child on the
threshold between the security of her home and the uncertainty
of the world outside. Then he remembered her vow that she
would not give in to the passing of time until they came to
tell her of her husband’s return from the abandoned train
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 508
station where the stone chapel of Saint Ndoni had once stood.
Aristi had never had the courage, in the face of such
determination, to let her know the terrible state of disrepair
the train station. It had been padlocked, its windows sealed
haphazardly with random, mismatched bricks. The weeds that
yellowed during the peak of summer now covered most of the
train tracks. The tall steel water pump at the end of the
platform was rusted and full of holes big enough for the
sparrows to hide their nests. Even the aroma of the chestnut
trees in the late autumn had withered away, cheating the young
girls of their chance to dream of a future husband.
Most of the people in Sheshi had even forgotten the schedule
of the trains; they had to rely on Old Tunuci, who sat there
day and night, on the wooden bench near the fountain in good
weather, or inside the coal shack when it was inclement. “When
the train stops coming to the station, Sheshi will be
forgotten and no one beyond the seven mountains will ever know
that it was once was a happy, thriving place, filled with
mules and donkeys waiting to quench their thirst at the
Fountain of the Three Crosses. It will be then that I will be
joining you in the café where they placed the picture of the
Boletini family, lest we ourselves forget.”
But no one could recall exactly to whom Old Tuci had spoken.
On the morning of the thick fog, Aristi did indeed hear from
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 509
one of the mountaineers that he had not seen the old man in
his usual place when he had taken the road towards the
chestnut grove at the foot of the mountain. “On my way up the
Gorge of the White Wolf I did not make much of Old Tuci’s
absence, thinking that he might have gone to look for his
white do, who was in the habit of chasing foxes early in the
morning as they came down from their holes to drink the water
from the basin of the fountain. But, on my way down that early
evening, with the sun just about to set behind the tallest of
the seven mountains, I took the shortcut that comes closer to
the train station and realized then that Old Tuci indeed was
not there. I wanted to make certain that my eyes were not
deceiving me, as they had been doing of late.”
Aristi and the others in the café had no reason to doubt the
account of the mountaineer. He was known to be a man of his
word, just as his father and grandfather had been. It was also
known that the mountaineer’s elder brother had killed a man
for having shed doubt on the family’s honor in the remote past
and then walked straight to the police station. He had made
his way through the crowd celebrating the Feast of Saint Rock
in the square. Aristi recalled how the villagers had blamed
the victim more than the murderer. And it so happened that the
young man whose throat had been slashed was not of the
village; he had come to it to take part in the festivities.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 510
The authorities had kept the stranger’s body, all covered with
salt in order to delay its decay, in the damp basement of City
Hall.
A week later, his father and elder brother came from their
village with a mule to claim the body. They left before
sunrise to avoid being seen by anyone curious about their
presence. But Old Tuci was waiting at the crossroads down in
the Ravine of Saint Leonard, through which anyone entering or
leaving Sheshi had to pass. He was struck by the father’s cold
expression as he followed his eldest son carrying the body of
his youngest, its head inside a canvas sack. Old Tuci heard
the parched lips of the father utter a piercing curse on the
village, and he knew that the patriarch’s stony gaze would be
forever engraved in his eyes. A dark cloud had enveloped the
village and had climbed, unimpeded, half way up the tallest of
the seven mountains.
That was the day Old Tuci returned to the main square and
took his place on the wooden bench facing the fountain. He
struggled to remember who he was and whether he really knew
anyone in the village. At first, the townsfolk showered him
with smiles and food; but, as the seasons followed, he found
himself sitting on the bench amidst increasingly unfamiliar
people whose speech varied little but whose clothes changed
shape very often. The only thing that remained as clear as the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 511
sky above the bell tower of the Church of the Dead was the
curse of the unfortunate father he had heard on that distant
dawn.
One day, Old Tuci put together three or four sounds that
seemed like the noise of an engine puffing white clouds from
its stack. To the surprise of all (except for the children
busy chasing the grasshoppers following the long band of
butterflies) he arose from the bench and walked straight
uphill toward the train station. According to the women at the
fountain wash basins, Old Tuci shone as brightly as the starry
sky when he left the square to take up residence at the train
station. As the years went by, all those who went up and down
the hill did not even have to look for Old Tuci; they knew he
would be there waiting to hear the whistle of the train as it
emerged from the long, winding tunnel.
So, as the news of the mountaineer reached every home in
Sheshi, no one believed it until they heard the name of its
bearer. Still, they had to verify it for themselves. Each
inhabitant took to the hill. Goat horns were blown to summon
all the men from the fields. Anyone near a church bell rang
it. By midday, the line of people reached from one end of the
village to the other. If anyone had looked from the top of the
mountain, he would not have hesitated to say that the people
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 512
looked like countless ants looking for food to save for the
winter.
But by evening, no one could say he had seen Old Tuci. What
haunted everyone was the old prophecy they had all heard
repeated on the eve of Christ’s birth but dared not think of
for fear of its coming to pass. Some of them betrayed anger at
not having anticipated the eventual disappearance of the old
man dressed in rags, his face lined with hundreds of wrinkles.
Others were relieved to be free from that anxiety which had
prevented their having a decent night’s sleep from the moment
they had heard the prophecy.
Through the streets of Sheshi the winds were howling more
strongly than usual, sounding like the cries of a wounded
animal. The dogs responded with deeper cries of their own.
Within the homes, long-held fears opened old wounds in those
who had lived expecting the end of time.
The café was filled with men waiting to hear some explanation
for his disappearance, but none of the speculation was
convincing. Aristi had never seen the place so packed or the
clients so jittery. To him, they looked like so many children
confused as to what direction to take and waiting for their
parents to rescue them. “This is going to be a night to
remember,” said the person who sat at the bar table. “I can
feel it in my gut. Those damned dogs are gnawing at my bones
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 513
with their barking. Could you fill my glass with wine, the one
that did not ferment and still tastes of the grapes’
bitterness? I tell you, I do not remember a night like this
one, and I have been around this place for a long time. At the
Road of the Three Serpents, a mule driver told me to bless
myself with holy water from the Chapel of the Virgin of
Constantinople before descending into the village. Now I
regret not having done so. I feel a strange emptiness inside
of me.”
Aristi listened to the man as closely as he could without
taking his eyes off the rest of the clients. They looked like
strangers to him. He struggled to remember who they were. “If
you could fill the glass, maybe it would help ease my fear a
little.” It was as he filled the glass that Aristi saw the
image of a woman within the eyes of the stranger. An
inexplicable feeling of sadness filled his heart. The
unfortunate stranger who had stopped for a glass of wine did
not even know that it would be his last. “The mule driver told
me that I could spend the night in the cave on the road to the
cemetery. If you could be so kind as to tell me how to get
there, I will be on my way.”
“You can’t miss it,” replied Aristi, his voice choking.
“There will be a deep gorge as you leave the last homes
behind. Take the road to the stone bridge. The place you are
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 514
looking for is next to the Fountain of the Three Crosses. I do
not know if anyone will be there tonight. The one who used to
live there moved to the abandoned train station many years
ago. Today he was not seen, and the whole village has been
looking for him.”
The stranger put on his cap, took a quick look at the picture
hanging above the door and left with all eyes upon him. “That
man will not find a place to sleep tonight,” someone present
murmured. Aristi followed the stranger with his eyes until he
could no longer be seen. He wanted to make certain that he
had taken the right road. The square seemed desolate as the
day after a celebration. The trees stood still, awaiting the
descent of the fog. “Perhaps it will lift by morning,” he
thought as he closed the door, convinced that no one else
would be able to find his way to the café.
Inside, a calm silence had settled. The crowd grew more and
more apprehensive about the stranger’s unexpected visit. No
one was able to identify the person, yet they were all ready
to swear they had seen him before, seated motionless, with
his head lowered to the ground on the steps facing the
forsaken barber shop. The one who had first noticed the close
similarity between the stranger and the figure on the steps
was Aristi. But, preoccupied with concern for his mother, he
did not ponder those similarities long enough to draw some
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 515
reasonable conclusions. Now he moved from the counter and
urged all of his clients to return to their homes.
They left, holding hands as they sought the white thread in
the thick fog. Breathless, they formed a human chain that
extended from the steps of the café to the end of the square.
Aristi wanted to count them, but he did not have enough time.
The fog moved more quickly than the line of people. He was
thinking that he should have brought the woolen thread from
home to connect the café to the street that faced the square,
knowing that it was the only way to avoid the vortex of the
fog. Now he thought of going to check on the stranger at the
Cave of the Three Crosses early in the morning. It was a way
to assuage the odd pity he felt for the traveler. Having
cleaned the tables and put the glasses into the sink to soak
for the night, he decided to leave a burning light in the
front window to help him find his way home.
The balcony on Aristi’s house faced the front window of the
café. Many a time he had sat there to keep an eye on the
place for as long as he could. He would breathe deeply the
cold breeze that, on summer nights, never failed to come down
from the mountains just as the moon took its place right on
top of the stone cross at the end of the square. There had
been many full moons since his father had left the village in
search of that wonder drug that could bring his wife back to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 516
the flow of water disgorging from the mouths of the gargoyles
on the main fountain. Now he found himself on the other side
of the divide, with his hair as gray as those of the elders
sitting on the wooden bench. There had not even been a letter
from his father, let alone a dream that could keep his hopes
alive. By now, the people he had grown up with had children
of their own; they all had plans to replace their fathers. He
had remained alone, never having known the sweet breath of a
woman or so much as looked into her eyes.
“We might have to come to the end of our days,” he muttered
more than once, as he watched intently for the candle still
burning in the café window. All was pitch dark. Near the old
barber shop a fading light swung with the wind, disappearing
into and emerging from the fog, almost like the water of the
vast sea fighting to hold onto the air before being taken
down by subsequent waves.
Aristi had been seeing the waves in his dreams night after
night. Every morning he asked his mother for an explanation,
but she could not interpret his dream. She had never seen the
great waters; she had only heard accounts of them from her
father when he came back from the long war. Aristi himself
recalled having seen waves as tall as the bell tower of the
Church of the Dead on the movie screen when it first opened
in the village. Those waves had forced everyone in the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 517
theater to run for safety, thinking that the waters were
actually about to inundate the place. At this point the
dreams brought back bad memories of the seventeen days of
rain that had opened deep gullies from the middle of the
mountain to the flat lands. The storm had brought down from
the mountain and through the streets of Sheshi whole trees,
as well as animals of all kinds, all puffed up and upside
down, their legs stiff.
The torrential rains disappeared at the bottom of the
village, where the small brook made its way underground and
never came up again. It took weeks for the people of the
village to bury some of the animals and to burn the others in
massive piles. The tree trunks were collected for burning
during the winters. The people who saw it said that the side
of the mountain itself came down like a stack of wood,
revealing a series of caves with strange carvings on their
white stone walls. Some looked like spiders and others looked
like goats. But the people in the village considered the
caves to be those of the devil who lived underneath the
mouths of the two volcanoes filled with water. For years, no
one dared to go close to the clear patch of the mountain,
which seemed to devour all the rays of the sun, especially at
midday, creating a sheet of light in the sky. On rainy days,
the white of the stones shed the tears of pain of all those
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 518
who had perished for drawing too close to it. So it seemed to
those who ventured to look at them.
Aristi could almost touch the fog as he climbed the steps to
his home. There were thirteen steps, but, to his surprise, he
found many more in front of him, and they grew ever steeper.
He was certain he had taken the right street. The candle
light from the café had gone out. It could not be seen as he
turned half-way around. He found himself searching for air.
“Maybe the long steps are tricking me,” he murmured brokenly.
By the time he reached the top, he had counted thirty-three
steps, so he knew that he had gone to the right where there
were, indeed, thirty-three steps, rather than to the left,
where seventeen steps now led straight to the house.
Reorienting himself was just a matter of following the soft
breeze that was always present on that side of the steps.
By now, a heavy, dark cloud had come from the direction of
the sea, made its way over the seven mountains, and loomed
over Sheshi. Old Tuci was the only one who later saw the dark
cloud making its way through the thick fog and moving like an
old snake through every street. Of all the people who had
spent three days and two nights looking for him, it was
Aristi who was destined to meet him that night. And not by
chance did it happen, for Old Tuci’s house stood on the way
to his own, if one came from above. There indeed stood Old
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 519
Tuci on the steps of his grandfather’s house, holding a small
candle and a bundle of dried oregano leaves to keep the
fireflies away from the flame. For Aristi, that candle burned
more brightly than any of the stars he usually saw on a clear
night from his balcony. He knew exactly who it was sitting
there. “The whole town has been looking for you,” he said,
hoping that his voice carried through the fog. “I have come
home to stay,” Old Tuci replied, in a voice that Aristi did
not know, for, after all, he had never heard the old man
speak before; he had merely glimpsed him once or twice as he
boarded the train. “The one I had been expecting came early
yesterday morning with the five o’clock train.”
For a moment, Aristi was inclined to think that it was the
speech of an elder who was as old as the village itself. In
fact, it was said by those who sat on the bench in the square
that they had learned of Old Tuci from their own greatgrandfathers. But the clarity of his voice and the perfect
symmetry of the sounds he uttered convinced Aristi that
someone important to Old Tuci had indeed arrived.
A swarm of lightening bugs swirled in the direction of the
old barber shop. “They must have found some warmth under the
almond tree,” Aristi thought as he hastened to open the door
to the house with the heavy iron key. He found his mother
again asleep, but she had left a slice of bread and some
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 520
cheese for him on the table. Taking a chunk of charcoal from
the fireplace, he wrote “The fog has come to stay,” on a
piece of wood. Then he noticed that the shoes his mother was
wearing were twice as large as her feet.
He realized that he could not recall her age, but there was
no point in looking for a calendar in the house. Years ago
she had addressed him
obliquely: “Numbers and days are the
trick of the Devil. If you want things to happen, you’ll have
to be patient and wait for them to befall you.” From that
time forward, Aristi had learned how to keep his own time. He
counted the days by observing the movement of the sun around
the bell tower and the position of the moon over the stone
cross. Truth be told, the square had its own clock and a
heartbeat that everyone in the village could sense at five
o’clock in the afternoon. It was precisely then that the
light mingled with the incoming darkness and formed a shade
where the soul of the square took its particular shape.
That night, Aristi found himself in the deepest recesses of
the waves;
lost in sleep, he spent the last hours of the
night gasping for air. He awoke to see the fog invading the
house through every opening. He washed the salty taste from
his mouth with the little water that had been left on the
ceramic plate the night before and glanced at his mother,
still sleeping soundly but now looking like a young girl on
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 521
the threshold of puberty. Her cheeks and high forehead
bespoke the energy of life yet to be lived. Aristi attributed
this rejuvenation to his mother’s ability to undo the
corrosive effects of time.
Opening the balcony door, Aristi was confronted with
compressed fog. Once again, as in his dream, he tried to
decide which was the better course: to bring more thread with
him or to write as many signs as he could with different
colors and post them to and from the café. He was sad not to
see the long lines of donkeys and mules leaving for the
fields which often brought a smile to his lips as he
daydreamt. On this day, while he could not detect the
fountain through the glassy fog, he swore that he could hear
the familiar sound of water falling into its half-empty
basin. The thought that one day no one in Sheshi would be
able to see anyone else sent a cold shiver throughout
Aristi’s body; it stopped right at his throat, so that he
gasped for air.
Closing the balcony door, Aristi sat down to make the signs
with all the paper he could find. It took him several hours
to come up with enough of them to place on every street of
the village. As he worked, Aristi reviewed the stranger’s
difficulties in finding the entrance to the village, which
did not appear on the map he had carried with him. “I could
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 522
see nothing more that a distant light as I descended the
rocky road. I could not tell whether it was a pile of wood
burning or a flickering light in front of a farmhouse, for
its size seemed to change in the wind that burned my cheeks
and froze my hands. The descent was long and out of my
control; really, I felt an unseen force pushing me down and
preventing me from looking back. The sound of the water
directed me to your place. At first, I thought I was near a
brook because the air was filled with a fine drizzle that wet
my face. But the light and the human voices far in front of
me gave me the strength to approach.”
“What exactly drove you to search for our village?” Aristi
recalled asking the stranger. “I have been told that a man
would come from beyond the sea bearing a potion that fights
memory loss, but no such person has arrived on any train. If
he had, the people you see here would have told me, for they
are all just as eager for news from the other side of the
mountains. It is what drives them to come to the café night
after night, even if, at times, they never reach the place.
It is the need for news of their loved ones, who left years
ago, that keeps them from dying of forgetfulness.”
At first, no one in the café seemed to have noticed the
arrival of the stranger. He was of small stature and thin. In
his eyes there was a great deal of fear, as if he were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 523
waiting for something to happen. “In the morning, Aristi
repeated to himself, I will seek news of the stranger.” After
saying this, he heaved a deep sigh and closed his eyes,
falling into sleep that, although deep, lasted no more than a
few hours. He had contrived all the signs with the care of
that child who is coming to know colors for the first time.
The fog’s viscosity had thinned, so that the steps were now
visible. Old Tuci had followed the footsteps of the stranger,
finding him curled like a kitten in the far right corner of
the cave. A pile of hay, more dust than husk, covered his
feet. Even that unidentified person in front of the old
barber shop was no longer there. “Things are taking a strange
twist,” Aristi mumbled loudly enough to be certain that it
was his voice and not that of anyone else. He made certain
that the three hundred copies of the sign he had prepared
were still under his arm. The soft drizzle had become a
steady rain, washing away the dark grey fog before him. From
the opening of the square, he could see the café looking
drenched and dejected, as if missing the presence of those
who spoke of the faraway places that filled everyone with
dreams night after night. His own expectations, however, had
gone away many years ago, before he started to limp, before
the thin veil descended into his eyes, rendering everything
unfocused to the point that he was, at times, unable to say
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 524
with certainty what he was seeing. The short walk to the café
had become a heavy burden. He was losing the ability to
concentrate on what was in front of him. His dreams appeared
to be more real than those forlorn images of the square,
disheveled in the steady rain. The latter was completely
deserted, the windows and balconies shut tightly to keep away
the cold. “By spring,” he thought, “many of the old-timers
will not be there to open the windows to the soft breeze.”
For years, the square had not seen any children running to
and from the fountain as the swallows circled ever more
quickly around the belfry of the Church of the Dead. Aristi
could not tell how many families remained in the village, but
the lights in the homes were growing sparse. Most of the
chimneys exuded no smoke, and that which actually emerged
from the few remaining chimneys struggled to reach the
nearest clouds so as to hide without being dissipated by the
rays of the sun.
Many of the people had lost all notion of time, for no
calendar had reached the village since the closing of the
train station. Naturally, the muddling of the seasons made it
impossible to know in which year the village was living.
People were no longer shocked to see snow flakes in the midst
of summer heat or the almond trees in bloom during the olive
harvest in the lands near the winding brook. Some who had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 525
ventured out of the village and were fortunate enough to find
their way back, returned with news of changes in the way
people communicated with one another. The revelations
frightened everyone.
“People, especially the young, carry with them a notebook
inside a box where words come and go according to what one
wants to say. The streets and squares are immersed in deep
and wide silences. All eyes are fixed on those boxes they
carry hanging from their necks. The tall electric phone lines
they took so long to build below the seven mountains soon
will be useless. Sounds will be traveling faster than the
winds we hear in the late fall. They say that manmade clouds
will be watching every angle in the world, getting even
inside the private places and revealing how life comes and
goes within them.”
That morning, with all the rain that had fallen since the
early hours raising the level of the water to dangerous
heights, the few young men left in the village did make it up
to the café. For a minute Aristi thought that things were
returning to the way they had been once, but, as he waited to
see others come up to the square, he felt a strange sensation
that this impression was false, because the men sat in
silence, looking at one another as if they were strangers.
The fog now started to thicken with a vengeance, leaving
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 526
little time to place the signs on each street that led to the
square.
The picture hanging inside, above the door, took on a
peculiar clarity, and the people visualized there had begun
to move about freely. The youngest had loosened his mother’s
grip and begun to approach the door. On the wall he
recognized the copperware, arranged in horizontal rows just
as in his own home. He was hoping that the six clients would
notice the life that was hidden in that picture. Of course,
it was no news to Aristi that the picture had its own space
and time; long ago he had
found the right entrance to them.
Indeed, more than ever before, he felt the urge to share his
discovery with all those who would find their way to the
café.
It was then that Aristi began his unwitting descent into the
timeless beginnings of the village, not knowing that he would
never be able to find the way back to the café. With the
eagerness of old and a whole pack of signs, so carefully
drawn and colored, Aristi set out to penetrate the fog and to
lift the veil of darkness from its eyes. The silence that
reigned in the square sat solidly on the side wooden bench
and muted the sound of the water running from the mouths of
the three gargoyles at the fountain.
While he would have
preferred to enter the Church of the Dead opposite the café,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 527
Aristi could not find his way through the maze of fog, which
was banked as thickly as the walls of the church. Even the
small lantern he carried quickly suffocated because of the
lack of oxygen. Aristi placed it on the ground, thinking that
he would retrieve it on his way back. It was not to be. As he
descended, he could not recognize anything he glanced at,
even though, as a child, he had run through these streets
countless times and had many a time actually counted each
stone in the street.
“Time plays tricks on everyone,” he said, more determined
than ever to go on with his desire to place the signs at each
street entrance. He moved as nimbly as he had when running
with his friends around the fountain trying to tire the
flying swallows. By now, he could actually see much better,
yet the houses seemed unfamiliar and the sounds of the
invisible voices indecipherable. Streaks of blue traversed
the grey clouds, furtively revealing the colors of the homes.
Unaware, Aristi was walking in the footsteps of the three
wanderers who for centuries had been attempting to reach the
forked road in order to place the icon of the Virgin of
Constantinople on the highest spot, out of danger from the
brook that ran through the hidden strawberry fields. Upon
seeing the Icon, the three wanderers witnessed tears of blood
descending from the snow-white face of the Virgin. They
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 528
quickly spread the news throughout the lands of the seven
mountains. In just a few days, columns of people, some on
carts, others on foot, still more carried on others’
shoulders, could be seen crossing the steep road around the
seven mountains, trying to reach the sacred grounds of the
Virgin of Constantinople.
Some were quietly reliving the call to arms to block the
advance of the Turks at every bridge, turning the waters of
the rivers into carriers of dead bodies massed together like
logs after an avalanche. During those years, no seed had been
planted in any of the fields inundated by the bloody waters.
On the roads, endless lines of women in black searched for
their kin. The wailings of the women with their stricken
faces could be heard centuries afterward in the deepest
recesses of the night. Every field became a cemetery. The
dead claimed new boundaries with streaks of blood coded in
the unwritten laws of the mountaineers. High peaks of stone,
where no vegetation grew, watched passively over the
passersby as they followed their evasive destiny, which
beguiled them behind the piles of stone.
Of late, Aristi had witnessed the return of the mountaineers
after centuries of lacing together the changes of the
seasons. They brought with them the Icon of Isa, dipped in
blood and placed on top of the new stone bridge in front of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 529
the chapel of the Virgin of Constantinople. Under the moonshaped bridge they buried the sighs of the past. Without
fanfare they set new boundaries around the village, reclaimed
the ancient homes carved under the mountain, and called for a
week of celebrations. The women placed on their balconies
their best woven carpets. The festive atmosphere touched
everyone, even the ones who had stubbornly refused to
participate in the rebuilding of the train station. They had
known as everyone else did but did not have the courage to
say, that even train stations decay and crumble and that
trains could be made to travel backwards.
In the chestnut grove above the train station the three
wanderers shed rivers of tears. They had finally recognized
each other. The earth upon which they sat became soft and
aromatic. From an ant hole, a white incense awakened in them
the delirious desire to join hands in a circle. They were
lifted from the ground by a carpet of white feathers plucked
from their own bodies by a meandering flock of doves. An
indescribable music rushed from the mountains through the
ravine and the newcomers to the village dug deeper caves at
the bottom of the ravine. The women with deep inward eyes
separated the seeds with a single glance, and the children
opened straight lines on a nearby patch of earth, eagerly
awaiting the desired seeds. All stood still, the eyes of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 530
mothers gently caressing the cheeks of their children. The
brook flowed with the clearest waters in memory. Flowers and
animals saw their image and properly carved their names on
the highest peaks of the seven mountains for others to
remember in the rings of time. The waters came to rest at the
sacred cave and the heart beat was heard throughout the
adjoining villages. The sacred cave brought the people from
the lands of alchemy and the strait of the gods of all the
winds. They came to wash their tired feet and to dispel from
their eyes the veil of deceptions. They sought the arms of
the child-woman, builder of the infinite drops of life
bursting from the burning fire.
Through the tunneled opening in the fog, Aristi saw the
slanted eyes of the children with the colors of far away
skies. They waited to enter the sacred cave. Fusion of time
past with the present; fear of the Icon of the Dark Virgin
holding the child of life and death. Dazed, they circled the
pomegranate tree. From a distance, the eyes of their mothers
directed them toward the center altar. Silent looks of help
mingled with the desire to break the bond with childhood
fantasies. The smell of incense hidden in jars of terra cotta
mingled with the herbs adorning the walls. Unrecognized
sounds from languages lost long ago on the road of tears
filled the sacred cave. The woman-Prefti lit the tabernacle
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 531
with her fiery eyes and levitated to the awe of those
present, all of whom lowered their eyes to the ground. The
smell itself inebriated the young initiates, who began to
float with their minds and their bodies in the timeless
incense of yesterday and of years to come.
From the chestnut grove, the three wanderers recited the
prayer of their forefathers as they scattered pits of olives
over the wet earth. The howling of the wolves had been
pounding on the decayed wooden doors of the abandoned caves.
The shepherds spent the night keeping vigil over their herds.
Night turned the olive branches into icicles, which dripped
deeply into the earth. “They are the tears of the night
stained by the rays of the sun.” The three wanderers had aged
with the bark of the olive trees, leaving behind a pulsating
throb in the silence of the winter. The fire burned high,
sending signals of smoke that the three wanderers interpreted
with the movement of their hands. Songs of lost harmony
slowly issued from their mouths and quickly mingled with the
twisting smoke around the ceramic pot. The boiling drink was
passed from one to the other as the three savored the
sensations of days past. The lands of the seven mountains
were marked with the limbs of the three elders. Caravans of
people followed from across the sea searching for the land to
plant their seeds. The beacon of hope traveled as fast as the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 532
early morning rays, filling the rocky road with endless lines
of ragged people. Journey upon journey caused dilapidated
bodies to accumulate in the ravines. Vitreous eyes opened
even deeper crevices in the parched earth, for everyone left
on the side of the road a dried twig and a distant look,
beckoning the children to follow on the uphill walk where the
brick train station overlooked the village. The eyes of the
young filled with broken glass; their legs felt the chill of
the frozen ground. Within the circles of ice, the village lay
frozen in time. The white-washed walls of the homes turned
into mirrors, anchoring their reflections onto the branches
of the chestnut trees. On the steel latches of the train
station, the silence hung high. The few pieces of furniture
had taken on the color of dry wood left to decay. The eyes of
the three wanderers filled with tears. Unable to identify the
source of the decay, they looked deeply into themselves. They
blamed the first locomotive which had stopped that spring day
to fill its engine with fresh water. It was the train that
took away the young who had just come of age and whose minds
had been infected by the magazines they had leafed through
during the long winter days.
“They have never seen what lies on the other side of the
seven mountains,” asserted all three of them. “There is the
sea and the ocean. Rivers wash the people away like so many
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 533
ants. Children are left alone to starve among stacks of
chimneys as tall as the highest mountain one sees from the
square of the village. Others are left alone to starve on the
banks of frozen rivers. Some take up arms dreaming of putting
things in order only to find themselves being placed on
foreign walls with their bodies full of holes smelling of
lead. Across the divide crosses of wind placed on the parched
earth. From the graves issues the putrefied dew exhaled by
the black lungs of the mine diggers. The children are left
orphaned in the sweet memories of their mothers, who quickly
turn into black ravens wailing in the wind.”
Aristi reminded himself that it had all begun at daybreak
one early spring morning. The train master had awakened with
terrible pains in his knees. During the morning, the swelling
had worsened, and, as the skin about his knees had taken on a
yellow tinge, a sense of foreboding had taken hold of his
mind. It had kept him tied to the chair for hours during the
day. He lived alone, but he had never felt the loneliness
that the others talked about in the café. Caring for the
train station as well as preparing and checking the train
schedule daily kept him busy and unconcerned about events
down in the village square or at the café. He came down for
his usual cup of coffee that I prepared for him and to see
those faces with which he had become familiar. He was fearful
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 534
of forgetting them. The trainmaster confessed to me, after
making certain that no one else could hear it, that a nagging
dream had kept him awake for most of the night. “It ended
only when I heard the pecking of the crows on the window. The
details of the dream were still clear in my mind as I
prepared to reheat the cup of black coffee left over from the
previous day. I looked out of the window to make certain that
the fresh paint on the cement wall of the station was still
there. In the dream I saw an abandoned station with the
windows all shut and the entrances padlocked. The cool breeze
that each morning descended from the mountains was filled
with the piercing cries of countless people. Their numbers
filled the front and the back of the station. I tried to
recognize at least one face, but I could not. The picture of
the first locomotive in the office and the sturdy men in
black uniforms who set the rails was enough to convince me at
the moment that the dream had indeed been just a dream and
not a premonition of things to come.”
That very morning, Tunuci put on the uniform he had just
received from the State and opened the door to the platform
to await the train scheduled to arrive at half past four. He
took an old cloth and dusted the benches in the waiting room.
He checked the bell that was to start ringing ten minutes
before the arrival of the train. The fledglings in the nest
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 535
under the rooftop had ventured into the sky for their first
flight. The train master glanced at the telegraph message and
read that work on the tracks was to begin that day at seven.
The special crew was coming from the regional capital.
Through the cracks in the walls of the main room he heard the
wind banging against the loosened glass of the window. It was
an unusually bitter morning for the season. The family
scheduled to depart on the four-thirty train had already
arrived. Tunuci remembered speaking to the uncle who had
accompanied the family to the station. “I do not want you to
tell anyone of their departure. You know how people are in
this village. They are capable of doing anything to hinder
their leave-taking.” In fact, Tunuci remembered nodding his
head to the uncle and touching his shoulder. The people in
the village had changed for the worse. Anonymous letters
accusing some of the villagers of treacherous dealings
against the party in charge circulated with ease. People had
become suspicious of one another, and political conversations
in the café were forbidden. People gave vent to their
frustrations at night, when alone and immersed in their
dreams.
“In a half hour the train will take the family away from
this accursed village where the secular desire for vengeance
has ruled since the beginning of time.” He gave another
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 536
glance at the bell as if wishing for it to begin to ring.
Tunuci, the trainmaster, was from another village, which was
quite a distance beyond the seven mountains. It had taken him
more than three days in the midst of winter to reach the
police station of Sheshi and present his papers, received
from the region’s prefect, to the one in charge. It was late
in the evening when he saw the few flickering lights of the
village. He decided to take lodgings for the night at a
farmhouse just beyond the main road. He remembered clearly
the words of the prefect. “At first it will be hard for you
to adjust to this new assignment. The people will be like
strangers to you. They speak in a tongue no one understands
outside their own village and they have ways of doing things
that are not familiar to the outsider. But the directives of
the party are to bring everyone together, no matter how
different they are.”
“It would be best for the family to be on the train before
the black-shirted workers show up,” the train master said as
he descended the steps that led to the waiting room. The
dream of the dilapidated train station of the night before
was still on his mind. He thought of consulting the old woman
at the bottom of the village. He had been told by the prefect
the day he received his new commission to seek the advice of
the one-legged woman for any problem he needed to solve. “She
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 537
knows everyone in the village and has ways of changing the
course of things. Anyone in the village will point out her
house to you. It is only visible to those who live there, for
they all suckled at her breasts.”
From the dirt road below, the train master could see the
open track that was bringing the black-shirted men to work on
the tracks. The twenty-four men were all of the same height
and strangely similar in features and gestures. Their leader
towered over them like a medieval fortress placed in the
middle of brick and stone homes leaning on one another. The
men worked silently and with determination. “Let them do
their work and do not interfere in any way with their plans,”
the prefect had cautioned, almost whispering in his ear as
they left the office together. “They come with orders
directly from Rome to quell dissent by whatever means. Those
who leave the country in a time of need are looked upon with
deep suspicion. Do keep a list of all those who depart and
arrive at the station. We want to know what color shirt they
wear and you must notify us immediately if there is any red
in their apparel.”
In all his years as train master, he reported no one. In his
dream, there were rivers of blood. Along both shores he had
seen endless lines of soldiers departing for the South or
returning raggedly from the North. The soldiers greeted each
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 538
with white handkerchiefs. The clouds overhead were pitch
black and moved faster than any wind he could recall. “In no
time autumn will slip into winter,” he observed as he wiped
the cold sweat from his face. He opened the register and
added the family to it. “The mother and two children, three
in all.” Underneath he wrote the name of the family and those
of the mother and each child. He did not know that he was
erasing the name of the clan from the village. The register
was as old as the never-ending war. The station became the
place where the villagers saw each other for the last time.
It had always been the place of arrival and departure of
people coming to and from the seven mountains but with no
definite location beyond them.
The dream of the abandoned train station was to follow the
train master until the last days of his life on the wooden
bench on the south side of the square in Sheshi. For years he
relived the departure of the mother and her two children. “It
was the morning the dreadful dream took over my mind. I
turned on the bell ten minutes before the train was due to
make its entrance from the east tunnel. The family had
arrived and taken its place in the waiting room. I recognized
the fourth person, to whom I had sold the train tickets. He
had identified himself as the uncle of the family the night
before at the café. The mother, whose black shawl covered
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 539
most of her face, sat motionless with a child on either side.
I could feel her eyes scrutinizing every bit of the waiting
room. She seemed to have come from one of those antiquated
pictures that sit inertly on top of an old bureau in every
house filled with inaccessible memories. On the other hand,
the uncle paced up and down the platform, his eyes fixed on
the tunnel. Every now and then he would put his hands in his
pockets, perhaps to ascertain that the tickets were still
there. The younger child had climbed onto her lap. The older
boy, with his eyes lowered to the marble floor, seemed out of
place and uncomfortable in the tight jacket he was wearing.
The bell picked up speed and was ringing with greater
intensity. Each sound bounced back and forth like a distant
echo bounced by an imperceptible wind. The family members
carried only one piece of luggage secured by a rope.
In the distance, a streak of light was making its way
slowly out of the tunnel. The swallows had gathered to
undertake their usual chase of the puffing engine. At that
point, the uncle lifted the luggage and directed the mother
and two children to the platform. He handed the tickets to
the older child and embraced each quickly. He looked relieved
to have done his duty in the eyes of the woman and his kin.”
That morning, the train had arrived with just a few
passengers. The villagers along the railroad line were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 540
convinced that the train only came by to take people away.
“Whoever gets on that train will never come back,” people
were heard whispering to one another. For many years, the
train did take away many soldiers who never came back. For
many years after, the train master was to remember the elder
of the two boys waving to his uncle as the train made its way
out of the station. Then he disappeared behind the glass
window. Where the family was going no one knew. The house had
been thoroughly cleansed, padlocked and left there to wait
for one of them to return.
The train master carried the image of that family with him
for years afterwards. He looked for that hand wave in every
passenger who arrived and departed until he himself was
forgotten by the villagers. Once the tracks corroded and the
station crumbled, he decided to go down to the square and
take his place among the elders. On a clear spring day, the
train master, whom everyone by now knew as Tunuci, gathered
his strength and ventured inside the café. He swore to all
those present that he had seen a stranger walk down from the
train station towards the square. “I followed him with my
eyes. He rested on every wall that lined the road. As he got
closer I recognized the face of the young man who had waved
good-bye to his uncle. He quenched his thirst at the fountain
and then fixed his eyes on the tallest of the seven
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 541
mountains. He had a sad demeanor. It was the kind of
expression that one sees on a person who has finally found
the place he has been searching for.”
The only one who paid attention to what Tunuci had to say
was Aristi. That day, the owner of the café thoroughly
cleaned the portrait that hung over the door. Aristi knew
that great changes were about to take place in the village.
Years had gone by and no one had come back to Sheshi. The
abandoned train station and the seven mountains yearned for
their return. The appearance of the stranger was seen by
those who remembered as the beginning of their homecoming.
Aristi recalled the lines of people leaving the village.
Those processions had grown longer and longer as he grew in
age. The days came and went like the many suppressed feelings
of those departing. The postman himself had been at a loss to
deliver all the mail his office was receiving. The names and
the locations indicated on the envelopes did not appear on
any of the official documents of the municipal building. It
was said that the postman even sought the help of the great
mother at the end of Sheshi to deliver the mail to the next
of kin. The answer he received confused the postman even
more. “I cannot give you any clear identification. They all
look the same…grandfathers, fathers and sons; but the stones
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 542
with which they built their homes have not deteriorated to
the point of changing the architecture.”
The postman returned to the post office, gathered all the
mules in the village and began to deliver the mountains of
mail. It took him ten days to load the team. He set out early
one morning, trying to avoid the hot sun that turned every
plant brown until five in the afternoon. The train master and
Aristi, unbeknownst to each other, had both observed that
morning a flare of bright light in the sky. Certain that the
postman would never be able to deliver all that mail in his
lifetime, the train master decided to draw a picture of every
passenger he remembered departing from Sheshi. “It is the
only way to keep a tally of those departing as well as to
record their facial identity,” he was to tell Aristi on the
morning he decided to walk into the café. He made it a point
to draw the passengers according to the trait that defined
them. Further, he washed the walls of the office and scraped
away the mold that had been creeping up from the cracks. On
each drawing he placed the date and time of departure. As
time went by, he began to realize how different the figures
turned out to be in looks and gestures. Through the long
winter days, when the railroad shut down because of
avalanches, the train master spent many an hour speaking to
each drawing and reliving those moments encapsulated in them.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 543
The lot kept each other company, for the loneliness to which
he had formerly paid no attention was beginning to gnaw at
his knees, preventing him from going up and down the stairs,
as he would wish to have done.
And it was indeed true that, just as the village had
forgotten that Tunuci still ran the station, the train master
himself had never expected the people of Sheshi to accept
him. “They have a natural distrust of anyone wearing a state
uniform,” the commissioner had advised him. “For years they
kept the village out of reach. It was even reported that they
would go out at night to undo the only road that connected
Sheshi with the monastery on the cliff of the two lakes so as
to disorient those who were about to reach the village.”
Although in just a brief time the train master had learned
to recognize everyone in town, he had not succeeded in
persuading anyone to trust him enough for even a quick
exchange of greetings. At times he would take long walks to
the end of town where the houses, each with a unique
architecture, seemed to age more slowly. There he hoped to
come face to face with the people returning home from the
fields. “Perhaps one of them will recognize me for having
been at the station,” he endlessly repeated to himself as he
walked down the steep, narrow street, careful not to slip on
the uneven stones that protruded visibly here and there.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 544
He would return home after stopping briefly at the café to
sip a cup of dark coffee at the corner table next to the only
window in the place. From there, he scanned the square from
one corner to another. Some women would pass by all covered
with a black shawl, never daring to look toward the café
frequented only by men. Very rarely had Tunuci seen a man and
a woman walking together; mostly, the woman would follow ten
paces behind.
The train master no longer remembered how many times he
traveled through the same street. The pain that years before
would come and go without leaving any definite sign was now
becoming more frequent and unbearable. “It would take more
pain than that to force me to give up the walk,” he would say
convincingly, thinking that the words would make it easier to
go down the street the next day.
But the train master was never able to appreciate that the
villagers, especially the mothers, cursed the train station
because it forged in their children the desire to leave home.
It was the fear that every mother suffered silently, unable
to share it even with her husband. To the women it was as if
a terrible disease afflicted every young man when he reached
a certain age. What was worse now was that these symptoms
were even beginning to appear in certain girls. Some in the
village spoke of dynamiting the tunnels to prevent the train
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 545
from reaching the station. The elders warned of terrifying
changes coming from the sky which were totally invisible but
could be caught by small wires held together by metal cables
in boxes. They had seen them in their dreams as clearly as
the sun which set behind the seven mountains. The great
mother was even working on a powdery potion to be given to
the children before the age of puberty. “It is designed to
have them long for home,” she told every mother who flocked
to her home when the men were in the fields, “but you cannot
keep a fledgling in the nest forever.”
But all attempts to convince them of the inevitable were
futile. There was something deep within these women that
compelled them to look after their children as a hawk looks
over the fields from the sky. There was no night in which the
train master did not hear the piercing cry of a mother whose
son was about to be snatched from her. It was the most
frightening wailing one could hear, for it brought with it a
heavy cloud of silence that broke the limbs of the almond
trees in the square. Tunuci never saw a smile on any of the
women sitting outside their homes taking advantage of the few
hours of cool breeze before the doors and windows were locked
for the night. It was not long before he realized why. Each
home was missing a family member who had gone across the
ocean to seek his fortune.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 546
To those leaving, it was the only way to change the
family’s lot. For the train master, the women’s dark eyes
held the key to the mysterious world of the village he was
destined never to truly encounter. During days of
forgetfulness he took the road down to the center of Sheshi
to observe from afar the women who had brought their clothes
to scrub at the public fountain. They all resembled the woman
clinging to her two children as the train made its way out of
the tunnel. Many years later, on one of those uncertain
afternoons when no train was due to arrive, he noticed while
seated on the wooden bench a white-haired person seated on
the steps of the old barber shop. He became curious when he
saw the women stop in front of him with a wrapped
handkerchief. He got closer and was not surprised to see
underneath the wrinkles the face of innocence waving goodbye
to his uncle. The stranger lifted his eyes, half smiling and
half filled with tears and pleading silently reached for the
train master’s hand. With unexplained strength, Tunuci
returned to the train station to look for the sketch of the
mother and her two children which he had drawn years ago. To
his surprise, the thousands of sketches seemed to have a life
of their own. They had established bridges of different
sounds and colors to talk to one another. It was then that
Tunuci noticed that his feet were much smaller than the shoes
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 547
he wore in the picture as the train master. The sleeves of
the uniform that he had maintained so carefully were now
covering his hands, which had retreated completely inside.
His eyes looked inward as they sensed and followed the
memories of the deep past…
That night he shed his uniform, which fell in the most
disorderly heap in the middle of the basement, and found
himself in the midst of all those faces he had drawn over
more than half a century. Years and years later, when the
engineers came from the big city to unfasten the clamp that
locked the tracks which connected the sea with the villages
around the mountains, they could only confirm finding a
uniform and some strange colors on the walls of the train
station. “In some of the colors,” the brief report noted,
“could be seen vague lights that appeared to go into hiding
in the many holes in the walls. These lights were probably
caused by the intense humidity and the mold that had taken
over the station. Many unidentified odors were also noticed.”
The exact date of this report could not be substantiated by
anyone still living either in Sheshi or in the big city.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 548
Chapter Eleven
Soon after, the trains that came from where the sun rises no
longer stopped at Sheshi’s train station. The tall brick
building that took on the colors of the changing seasons no
longer saw the people strolling back and forth on its
platform waiting for the electric locomotive to make its
appearance. The children who climbed the hill behind the
tracks to gather blackberries were never seen again. By then,
the half-opened windows banged against each other, clipping
off the wood and scattering the few bits of window pane still
remaining in them. The eve of the roof, at one time filled
with swallows’ nests, was infested with a maze of ivy
drilling through the roof in search of sun rays. It was only
on hot summer evenings that the train station kept company
with the bent figures of old-timers who climbed the hill in
search of a cool breeze.
Among them was Vlasë, who had sat for many years on the
wooden bench of the square. He had witnessed the withering of
the almond trees and the corrosion of the bronze statue
dedicated to the “Unknown Soldier” whose plaque no one had
ever succeeded in deciphering. That failure did not stop
anyone in the village from taking off his hat and bowing as
he passed before it. Vlasë spent the cool mornings in the
square, feeling the distances more and more. The days came
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 549
and went with the same precision that they always had. His
eyes blinked and, as the rays of the sun brightened the
belfry of the Church of the Dead, he began laboriously the
ritual of rising with the help of his cane. The walk back to
the station was as painful as the procession on Good Friday,
as the figure of Christ fell three times on His way up the
hill to be nailed on the cross. The climb took the whole
afternoon; at times, dusk overtook him. “One of these days,”
Vlasë muttered to himself, “night won’t allow me to reach the
top and breathe the soft air that fills my chest.”
In moments of sadness, Vlasë caught glimpses of the table
someone would set outside the home of the train master with
slices of bread, a dish of green and black olives and fried
grape leaves. In the middle of the offering stood the picture
of Saint Joseph brightened by the light of a small white
candle moving to the call of the wind. But the many seasons
that had come gathering all the days as burned leaves in the
height of summer had done away with that tradition. It was no
longer practiced in any neighborhood of the village.
Vlasë would not be happy until he had reached the top, from
where he could survey the rooftops of the homes clustered
together like sheep at dusk as well as the fields asleep with
long memories. But the past always brought Vlasë to the time
before the harvest of the grapes. Vlasë reviewed the long
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 550
lines of peasants going to the vineyards. The grapes in gold
and deep blues filled the sky with the scent of the gods. It
was in such a season that he was told in a dream to climb to
the train station to await the return of the wandering
laborers after years of loneliness in faraway lands. It was
the beginning of endless climbs, even though Vlasë was fully
aware that the train station had been abandoned and the
trains no longer stopped on its front tracks. But he was not
about to question a dream that spoke as clearly as all the
people he remembered in his lifetime. However, he did not
mention it to anyone, not even to the one-legged woman with
whom he daily exchanged a quick greeting as she returned from
her visit to her son’s tomb. The old-timers knew that her son
had died of longing for someone, although no one knew her
whereabouts.
At the train station Vlasë had built a shelter with the wild
sugar canes that grew along a hidden brook. He tied them
together with stalks of yellow flowers about which the blue
butterflies spun, placing along the circular bottom the reed
clay that lined the banks of the brook. At night, unable to
close his eyes and wander into the world of dreams, he
awaited the rising of the sun by making puppets out of red
clay. He would first think of his mother, whom he remembered
looking the same as always. The aches he felt in his joints
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 551
disappeared as he went back in time and sat next to her
image, breathing as slowly as he could for fear of
obfuscating the vision.
Vlasë did not remember his father. Like all the fathers in
the village, he also had gone to the city caressed by the sea
searching for the secret that could free his family from
hunger and warm them during the winters. But the lack of a
clear remembrance did not keep Vlasë from shaping him in the
image of his grandfather at the cemetery. After all, those
pictures were very much alive in each of the villagers in
Sheshi. Meanwhile, an unusual silence had enveloped the
village. The noises of the children chasing and jumping over
one another in the square no longer reached Vlasë. He learned
how to rely on his inner sensations, which he had stored
inadvertently through the years to prevent the village from
slipping away from him.
“I will wait for the arrival of the last train that will
bring back their memories and all together we will celebrate
Vlamë.” Vlasë smiled remembering Vlamë. It was celebrated
during the first week of spring when the young ones were told
by the elders to search deep inside themselves so that those
who had gone away from the village could come back through
the cracks in the earth to share the Easter meal with all who
remained behind. The reunion took place in the olive fields
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 552
overlooking the cypress grove. The small green leaves of the
olive trees were radiant, already gathering and storing the
smell of the oil in the small nuts hardening with every ray
of sunshine. The sky was filled with almond tree petals
floating like boats sailing with the breeze. The elders took
pleasure in watching the young run in circles around the
olive trees. Vlasë sailed softly on those vivid memories,
smiling to himself as he lifted his head to breathe deeply
the breeze that was twirling inside the hideout. At night, he
rarely slept, so it was no surprise to him that during those
peak hours dreams came to him in waves. “It is just a matter
of time,” he reminded himself, “before I hear the whistle of
the train.”
Somehow Vlasë knew that no one in the village would have
believed that a locomotive could ride on tracks where the
spikes stood up like so many rusted nails ready to bend their
head against the broken stones. On Friday everyone was busy
running to and from the Church of the Dead to dust and dress
the statue of the Virgin Mary, which would be taken out of
the church exactly at sunset by all the village women dressed
in black.
At that time, Vlasë’s wait came to an end. From the east
tunnel emerged the locomotive exactly as Vlasë remembered it;
it pulled two small carriages half enveloped in steam. It
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 553
stopped a bit ahead of the station, perhaps because the
engineer was unable to see the main entrance to the two-story
building. Only one passenger descended, looking more towards
the mountains than towards the village below. Vlasë knew who
the man with the suitcase was. With the strength of youth, he
rose to greet him. “I have been waiting for you to come
back.”
Without hesitation, the passenger recognized in Vlasë the
face of his uncle Miklini of almost three decades ago whose
clear eyes and red face he had struggled not to forget since
the morning of the departure. “I knew you would come back and
claim the key to your family’s house,” Vlasë uttered.
“I had to bury them in the land they never claimed as their
own. But I did bring back their memories to be placed inside
the walls of our house.”
“They are already here,” Vlasë added. “I felt their presence
many winters ago. We have been keeping each other company so
as not to lose touch with those who have crossed the river
before us. It was they who told me that you would arrive on
Good Friday just ahead of the black clouds. ‘A thick fog will
make its way from the mountain,’ they said. ‘It will come
down to stay and will force the people to remain in their
homes for the rest of their time.’ Your house held its own,
even though the rain and the wind have corroded the outside
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 554
walls. The iron lamp on the wall of the balcony has been
replaced by a new one that lights with all the others in the
village. The barber shop where your father worked and built
birdcages in his spare time has not been opened since he
left. The tools and round mirrors are still there.”
The passenger held Vlasë’s hand and said firmly, “I could
not sell any of them.” That night he was seen seated on the
steps in front of his father’s barber shop.
“I needed to put things in order. It was, I believe, Good
Friday. How long I remained on those steps with my eyes fixed
on the padlocked door to the barber shop I do not know. I do
recall the wind lacing together clouds of fog suffocating the
hazy heat of the early mornings. From there I saw people
coming up and down the street without being perturbed by my
presence. I must have appeared a stranger to them or as
someone just resting from fatigue. By some strange force, one
early morning as I finished washing my face under the cool
water of the fountain in the square, I heard some familiar
voices coming from the right side, where the barber shop was
located. The stillness of the square was partly broken by the
few sparrows warding off the cold air from the highest
branches of the almond trees. The sign on top of the barber
shop had been washed and a row of chairs had been placed
outside. On the right wall hung a birdcage with a tiny bird
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 555
that pecked at a ball of seeds as it awaited the first rays
of the sun. It was one of those early spring days with an
array of colors ready to take their place in the fields below
the village. The water from the fountain gushed out with
reclaimed force to the delight of the women busy scrubbing
their laundry on the variegated stone that lined the canal.
The conversations from the barber shop had invaded the square
and even the owner of the café sat outside trying to catch a
few of the sounds.
It was as it had been that distant morning as preparations
began for departure the next day. The flower vases that hung
from the balconies had withered just a bit, but not enough to
indicate any passing of time. One by one the doors were also
opened to let the damp air out and to receive the fresh,
chestnut-scented breeze. The mill began to crush the wheat
grain and the smell of flour serpentined out of its crossbarred window to mingle with the humming of the women weaving
on the stone benches outside their homes.
“I still say that this war is going to bring nothing but
hunger and misery.” These words came clear and resounding
from the barber shop. Everyone listened without taking their
eyes from what they were doing. “The war is needed to find
space for the growing population,” answered a second voice.
Everyone recognized its tones. They had caused fear and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 556
trepidation in all of Sheshi for generations. The voice was
that of the biggest landlord of the municipality. His lands
reached as far as the peasants’ eyes could see. He controlled
every drop of water and the few trees which he would sell for
the winter, weighing each piece of wood as he would weigh the
ripened olives and the boxes of grapes at harvest time.
“I will not go to fight a war so that the rich can get even
richer.” That sort of talk could only come from one person,
and he was no stranger to anyone. He was called “the Saint”
by many in the village. The women had seen him light the
candles in the Church with a simple glance. Others maintained
that, many a time, he had cried together with Jesus on the
wooden cross and that their tears had mingled as they fell to
the marble floor in front of the altar. It was his presence
in church that brought the women to attend the celebration of
Mass.
Among those present was an ageless woman whose ancestry no
one else in the village could trace. She sat at her usual
place, dressed all in black. A long shawl covered her head.
She was such a tiny woman that, from a distance, one often
mistook her for a young child barely able to take her first
steps. She walked with a stoop and greeted no one. But,
whenever she approached the church, her presence turned noise
into silence. Even the children, playing in the square as
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 557
their fathers recounted the ordeals of the day to their
friends seated in front of the café, would stop whatever they
were doing and rush to be closer to their parents. It is
believed that she had confessed to Prefti Vlasi the imminent
death of the young man called “the Saint.” The priest paid
not attention to her, believing that it was natural that a
woman her age, who had never spoken before, would attract
attention to herself by announcing something as extravagant
as that. Little did he know, in fact, that a group of men who
wore black shirts and who preached honor and devotion to the
Fatherland had vowed to teach “the Saint” a lesson as an
example to anyone else in the village who might be harboring
the same thinking about the war.
The killing was carried out in the early morning hours. The
intended victim was returning home after a night of card
playing at the Catholic Center, which he had founded. Sheku’s
walk home had been filled with satisfaction. After a few card
games he had succeeded in teaching the young peasants the
letters of the alphabet. The silence that night was as heavy
as the humidity; it was broken only by the howling of some
stray dogs at the garbage dump.
As he turned the corner to the narrow street, Sheku could
not have known that it would be the last time he would count
the steps that led to his home. He felt an uncertain pain in
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 558
his abdomen and then wetness below his belt. He did not have
time to open his eyes again. The profusion of sweat was
followed by a cold, tingling sensation in his arms and feet.
They found him lying on his back in a pool of blood,
holding tightly to the heavy key of his home. It was the old
woman who gave the authorities the detailed account of his
death. The next day she was taken to a hospice where, it was
said, she was being fed and kept clean, as the State wanted
its senior citizens to be treated well. Sheku’s death was
never mentioned again, but someone in the barber shop did
dare to say that a village that does not bury its dead
according to the rules of the ancient cave will wither away
like cut hay in the heat of summer. The barber shop was
unusually busy that fateful morning, but no one had lifted
his eyes to see who had spoken so prophetically.
In the square the young joined the “Black Shirts,” eager to
leave behind the boredom or spurred by the need for real
adventures. And many more joined so that their families would
be taken care of by the State. Those who resisted
conscription were systematically purged in front of everyone
during peak hours in front of the municipal building.
One of the saddest purges involved a distant cousin of the
owner of the barber shop. It was rumored that he had seen
every corner of the world and could name the four winds that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 559
crossed to the north and south of the Equator. From each
place he had saved a page of a newspaper that not even the
most learned people of the village could read. When he spoke
of his travels, people of all ages flocked around to listen.
Their minds would fill with images of lush forests, with
rivers as wide as the plains of Apulia, swarming with fish
that looked as beautiful as a woman in the dawn of her youth.
But what pleased the young men the most was the description
of lands where spring never came to an end and the tops of
the trees, as tall as the seven mountains, filled with
bluebirds whose feathers spoke of ancient gods mixing water
with fire as they counted each star in the sky.
“Just out of the darkness of the two tunnels on each side of
the train station there is a world that not even the dreams
of our ancestors could fathom.” This was the sentence with
which Faluci opened his invisible book, attracting everyone
to stop and listen without heed to the movement of the sun.
“I tell you that you only have only to harness enough courage
to cross the wide ocean to reach the lands where the wheat
grows as tall as the wild sugar canes and the waters of the
rivers are as cold in the summer as they are in the winter.
There a person is respected for the strength of his
convictions and for his consideration for his neighbor. No
one tells you how long and for whom to work. According to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 560
their laws, which are inscribed above the entrance to every
major structure, it is written that all are equal in the eyes
of God and in the laws of those lands.”
To some, those words, even though not understood too well,
sounded like the sermons of the priest, Prefti Vlasi, on
feast days. Yet, the enchantment did not last long. As soon
as they stepped away from the imaginary grounds, the dreams
ended. Those with age had grown too skeptical and too bitter
from their life experience to place full credence in what was
being said. They feared for the young, whose eyes filled with
a strange glistening and whose curious minds wondered with
the images of those fabled words. These youths pleaded with
the storyteller to continue even as the sun began its
descent.
The sun had just hidden behind the mountains, leaving behind
a pale light that smelled of the dark when the four men in
black shirts came to summon Faluci, the storyteller, to the
party headquarters for a brief interrogation. The officials
took out a letter from a tri-colored envelope and read the
contents to the accused. Faluci got up from the ground where
he had been sitting cross-legged and followed them with
unmistakable resignation. He actually wondered why it had
taken them so long to come for him. He waved good-bye to the
children who remained seated around the circle and felt a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 561
strange happiness, for at least he had given them a glimpse
of the world beyond.
In fact, Faluci had dreamed of the whole event for seven
nights, but every time he had been awakened before reaching
the end. In a way, he was relieved that he would now be able
to see the realization of his dream. For all that, his eyes
filled with bitter tears as he walked flanked by the four
men, who did not appear to notice the hundreds of white
handkerchiefs that were being waved at him. The loneliness
Faluci had felt for so many years in the village since his
return that November evening was now dispelled by the doors
and windows of so many homes offering him hospitality and
solidarity. The square was full of people, their faces
expressing anger and impotence. They walked him to a
makeshift podium with only one chair in the middle. A fifth
Black Shirt brought a liter of castor oil, raised it and
faced the crowds in each of the four corners of the square.
Each of the four other men held one of Faluci’s limbs as the
fifth began to pour the castor oil into the mouth of the
storyteller. There was no struggle. Not a word was said.
Faluci managed to hold down the nausea. Upon being released,
he adjusted his coat and slowly descended the steps from the
podium. As he raised his head high, he noticed that every
person present in the square had lowered his.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 562
Faluci yearned to wash his face and mouth at the fountain,
but he headed straight home to avoid giving the Black Shirts
satisfaction. A storm or rose petals followed him as he
descended into the lower part of town. The air was sweetened
with a scent of youthful memories. The waters that sprang
from his mind were as clean as those left behind by the
melting snows, as gentle as the waves of the ocean caressing
sandy shores without disturbing a pebble. Faluci was in that
state of mind when the neighbors found him engulfed by the
fetid excrement and the foul smell that was never to leave
that part of town no matter how many times they scrubbed the
ground, no matter how many odiferous shrubs they planted.
Fear settled in the village. The mothers now openly
encouraged their sons to leave under cover of the darkness of
the night for safer places. It was the time when no news of
the outside world reached the village. The new train station
had been inaugurated with great pomp and military parades in
just a few hours. After the dozen soldiers paraded through
the main square nine times, they returned to the station to
board the last rain of the evening amidst cannon fire and the
piercing whistle of the locomotive.
The only barber in the village stepped out of the house that
morning after a sleepless night, determined to reopen the
shop and bring a bit of life to a village that had been
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 563
asleep for more than two decades. He peeked out of the only
window of his one-room house and saw the rain being channeled
through the roof tiles. The almond trees below had taken on
the colors of the gray stone walls of the homes. With such
relentless rain, one would be better off spending the day at
home, but the barber decided to go ahead and open his shop
even though no one would be able to come and start a
conversation. He prepared the last cup of Turkish coffee he
had left, one he had been saving for a special occasion.
Dipping a chunk of hard bread in it, he looked at the
calendar in front of the water basin. It was November 15,
1935, and outside there was an impenetrable silence.
Finishing the coffee, Rini closed the door and locked it
with a heavy metal key. The motion sounded heavier than
usual, but nothing around him stirred. He was going to dust
every corner of the barber shop and clean the round mirror in
front of the two revolving chairs. “When the rains stop and
the fog lifts, I will bring down a goldfinch to fill the air
with music.”
Rini’s legs felt heavy and the pain in his knees was
distracting, but he paid little attention to that. The
purging of the storyteller was keeping everyone at home. Rini
had recognized every one of the people who had attended the
spectacle, with the exception of one whose face was as
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 564
familiar as it was unidentifiable. It was the stranger
seated, his head between his hands and his elbows resting on
his knees, at the steps of the mill facing the barber shop.
The man’s distant expression reminded Rini of the many faces
he had seen in his youth; it was the same as that found among
the pictures on top of each tomb in the village’s cemetery.
The small suitcase at the stranger’s side suggested that he
had come from a long journey. But then, people came and went
in this village, even though the town itself never changed.
The great-grandparents looked just like the grandsons of
tomorrow. “Things do change, but not much,” Rini remembered
being told every now and then at home as his father shaved
his grandfather with an old razor in front of the entrance
for better light.
The square was immersed in the unique silence of November.
It was going to take quite awhile to dust the shop and to
sharpen the old razors. Rini did not remember when they had
been used last. The brushes and the basin would also have to
be cleared of cobwebs. “For the scissors I will wait until
the sharpener comes by on Friday,” Rini whispered, unaware
that he was doing so.
The posters of the big ships sailing across the ocean still
beckoned the mirrors as clear as a morning after a snowfall.
A sudden thought crossed Rini’s mind; there was no way to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 565
doubt it. The picture of the previous owner as a young
apprentice, his hands across the thin chest, resembled the
man he had noticed seated in front of the barber shop.
He rushed out of the shop to see if he were still there. The
rain had stopped and the fog was slowly disappearing into the
basin of the water fountain. The steps were empty, but a
smell of the time of old lingered. “Perhaps he will return to
claim his years after I open the shop.” Rini felt
reinvigorated by the thought that soon people would come out
of hiding and join others in the shop to continue the
conversations and get news of their acquaintances in the
outside world. But the sky had darkened unexpectedly, and the
rain was coming down more heavily than before. “If it
continues to rain this way, I will certainly see no one
today.”
Rini was thinking of the bird he had left behind, uncertain
that he had left enough seeds in the cage. He caught his
image in the round mirror and saw, strangely enough, that his
hair was completely gray. The color of his eyes had not
changed, but his cheeks were full of brown spots. “It is the
best way to tell that time really goes by, even though the
inside of things remains the same.”
The clouds were coming and going, chasing one another much
as swallows at sunset. The steps across were still empty and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 566
no one had passed by. A strong urge to taste a cup of dark
coffee took hold of Rini, but he remembered that the last
café had closed down since the owner was not able to find
his way back home on the night of the thick fog. Some said
he vanished into the vapors that came from the depths of the
earth down the ravine. Others, who saw him last at the café,
stated that they had seen him staring for hours at a picture
that hung over the door.
“We thought that Aristi
was thinking of something important and very personal, so we
did not make anything of it, but proceeded to play cards.”
Rini recounted years later. “But when the game was over with
no clear winner and we got up to settle the bill, there was
no one left in the café and the clock on top of the
municipal building was striking twelve. Outside it was pitch
black and the few lights left in the square seemed to have
been drowned by the heavy clouds that had come down to
quench their thirst at the fountain. I remember the night
clearly because, after that, there was no other night and
also because the stranger had come from a place no one
present in the café had either heard of or seen. He was
looking for a place to sleep. There were four of us that
night at the café. We wanted to walk home together into the
night, but each of us lived in a different part of the
village. I still don’t know where the others ended once we
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 567
stepped into that fog. As for myself, I only recall that I
could not breathe because I could not find a drop of air. I
was thinking of home, but I did not know which direction to
take. Besides, my head was feeling dizzy and I had to
struggle to keep the heavy fog from hurting my eyes. As I
closed them, I felt myself sliding slowly inside a tunnel
with my hands crossed over my chest. That’s what I wanted to
tell the barber through my mind that night, for that is
where I stopped.”
Rini found the key on the day Vlasë accompanied the
stranger to the steps in front of the barber shop. ‘It was
that confusing dream that made me search for the key, for if
there is a door that opens the world we cannot touch, it has
to be inside that barber shop.’ The humidity of Rini’s house
had loosened the brick that held the key.
The secret of its location had died with the last owner of
the house, the shoemaker who made shoes that outlasted
death. His son, it was said, had been the barber of the
village until he decided to join his older sister in the
land across the ocean. For years he had been enticed by the
white suits she would send his way every spring. ‘I’ll be
back after I see what my sister looks like. I’ll be taking
the two older children with me and leaving the two younger
ones with you.’ Those words spoken by the shoemaker’s son
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 568
were passed on from generation to generation and recited
every Christmas. The recital, which followed the slicing of
the bread baked with dried grapes, always ended with a
prayer for safe return.
Rini felt that he was not alone in the shop. From the
thickness of the round mirrors he heard faraway voices. He
was not alone in that tiny, irregular space. The owners of
those voices were watching every move he made and, at times,
he felt their presence very close, almost as if they were
breathing on him. “Soon people will be coming in and out of
this place. They will bring and take away news. It will be
again the way the elders remember it.”
Rini glanced at the wooden bench in the square under the
almond tree but saw no one seated. He could not bring to
mind the last time the old men sat there. Vague images of
children running with the swallows overhead, flying high and
low, appeared before his eyes, but he wasn’t sure whether
they were images from a dream or, rather, deep-seated
memories.
The square had been filled with silence for many years.
Those who had gone North would occasionally bring their
children back to the square for awhile during the hot summer
days. For a time, people thought that things would be the
way they had been, but it was not to be. Those children who
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 569
spoke different tongues and looked like no one else in
Sheshi never did find a place in the square from which they
could see the leaves of the almond trees fill with flowers
and then with fruit.
With the coming of the first cold winds, the square would
empty again. The winters that followed seemed with the
passing of years longer and more difficult to endure. The
fields below the village, which at the early signs of spring
bloomed with white and pink flowers, were gradually being
abandoned. The young men who, at first, came from the cities
at the foot of the snowy mountains to help their relatives
prepare the fields and seed them, rarely appeared anymore.
Their relatives learned to rely, in time, on those with
strange faces who had washed ashore from sinking ships to
tend to the fields.
It took many years to teach these refugees how to recognize
the taste of the soil and to feel the first breezes of
spring. The young newcomers stood by themselves at night in
the square, always looking towards those open fields where
the sun rises early in the morning. Their dark eyes and
brown skin fused with the colors of the earth as if they
were one with them. The new arrivals, who had come to stay
without their wives and their children, occupied the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 570
abandoned white-washed homes at the end of Sheshi because
the structures reminded them of those they had left behind.
It was then that the café reopened and filled with
strangers, much to the consternation of the old-timers. The
latter hoped wistfully for the return of those who had left
the village generations ago. “If they had only known that
the land that gives you birth can never be replaced, they
would have stayed home and learned how to take better care
of that land.”
The first to notice these changes in Sheshi was Aristi,
known to all for his reserved demeanor and his closeness to
his mother. “Things must change for the world to remain the
same,” he would say when the faces that suffused the café
had become totally unfamiliar to him. It was then that he
placed the old family portrait, which he had found among the
personal effects of his mother, over the entrance to the
café. He wanted it to remind him of how life used to be in
the village.
The few elders who stubbornly refused to leave Sheshi
expected difficult years ahead. Most had been struggling
silently to keep alive the memories of the past. Nothing had
changed inside their homes. Every piece of furniture was
aired and polished with virgin olive oil each spring so as
to keep animated the invisible fingerprints of the previous
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 571
owners. Even so, time moved in circles. It brought things
back, and it took them away.
The intense heat of the early afternoon hours had been
replaced by the cool mountain air. Rini sat outside,
skimming an old war magazine and recalling the days when the
square had been filled with people hoping to catch as much
as they could of the cool breeze. He still hoped to see them
come back with the return of the swallows from the sandy
shores of Africa. “It won’t be long before the square will
be smiling again with all those present, laden with stories
to tell. News will be coming from every corner of the globe,
filling the minds of the young with the same burning
curiosity as their parents and grandparents once felt. The
young women will be putting on their best clothes, washed
and ironed during the cold months, to look at the strangers
from the faraway lands.”
Rini wanted so much for those days to return, but the
emptiness of the square gently suffocating the water
fountain brought to his eyes a strange feeling of
loneliness. It was the same sensation he had felt when the
last circus had come to Sheshi and left after only one
performance. He moved the chair inside the barber shop and
saw that the stranger had not returned to claim his seat
across from it. He locked the door to the shop, intending to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 572
briefly stop at the café to ask for news of any newcomers to
the village. In the café, which he pretended to be open, he
sat at his usual place in the far corner, from which he
observed those coming in and those leaving.
Only one table was occupied by the unfamiliar figures who
had not been chosen for a day’s work in the fields. They sat
patiently gazing at the position of the sun. “We have to
wait for the next day,” they must have thought as they
prepared to play cards and curse some more in their own
tongue. Inside the café, Aristi was busy going over a pile
of discolored photographs which he kept inside a large
yellow envelope. Rini was surprised to see how much Aristi
had aged. He looked more and more like the people he used to
see strolling up and down the main square and stopping every
now and then to make a point. “We were probably waiting for
the same person as the years gnawed away at our strength,
but we never had the will to name the one we were waiting
for,” Rini thought.
Without raising his head from the pile of photographs,
Aristi muttered “He has returned. He’s been here for more
than a week.”
“I also have seen him on the steps across from the barber
shop,” Rini said to him. “It seems that he comes and goes
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 573
but no one knows who he is. He vanishes as they approach to
speak to him.”
He noticed Aristi’s furtive smile as he raised the
photograph he had been looking for. The foreigners had left
without saying a word. Outside, the wind was whistling
through the narrow side streets. Aristi placed the old
photograph on Rini’s table. The person was barely visible,
but there was no doubt in his mind as to his identity. One
of the photos was an exact replica of the framed photograph
that had been situated on the inside entrance to the café.
The only additions were the names of the people and the date
on the back of it. The year, written in large numerals,
reached beyond the realm of memories. No one in the café
seemed to remember that date. Of the family in the portrait,
only their names remained on the oldest tombs of the
cemetery. The last of them, who had arrived without being
recognized, had come to claim his parcel of land in the
sacred grounds.
“I will give to the last of the Boletini family the key to
his father’s barber shop,” vowed Rini as he brushed away the
dust from the colored posters with the long passenger ships
opposite the two round mirrors of the barber shop. Those
were the last words Rini exchanged with Aristi, and it was
the last time he was to see him. No one knew where Aristi
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 574
had gone to hide, but the general consensus was that he had
gone down the ravine to find the entrance to the ancient
cave of the serpent. It was the night during which a thick
fog had replace the fierce winds of the late autumn.
“It wasn’t long before the winds that cried as if in pain
took over the village. I remember getting close to the fire
while I waited for Aristi to return home. The sky remained
overcast for weeks with the days shorter than the nights.
Only a few lights could be seen in the distant darkness. The
village seemed to be floating on every cloud that passed by,
turning it into an empty cradle. The cries of the stray
dogs, looking for shelter, every now and then pierced the
thick walls of the house.
On one of those nights I heard a knock at the door. It was
past midnight on the silver clock over the fireplace. “I
have been waiting for days in front of the barber shop.”
“Come and sit by your fireplace,” I invited. After all, it
was his house. The one-room dwelling had been in his family
since their arrival in Sheshi from the waters of the narrow
sea. The stone with the family name carved on it was still
legible on the outside wall, untouched since the beginning
of time. It carried the family name and that of the city
that bridged the stormy channel between the two chains of
mountains. The old ballads, sung long ago by the elders of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 575
the village when every house was lit and the fumes from the
chimneys smelled of pine cones, told of a powerful man who
carried the dark virgin of the burned city of Constantinople
on his shoulders. He crossed mountains and seas with his men
until they found the cave of the mother serpent.
He was drenched with the rain that had fallen all day long.
I led him to the fireplace and looked into his eyes. There I
beheld the yearning of the wanderer for a place to rest. He
moved his fingers, crossing them tightly into the shape of a
nest and fixed his gaze on the burning log.
“Your uncle waited for your return until his last days. I
found the key to the barber shop among his personal
belongings.” He sat there as if he had never left the place.
A certain calm had taken possession of his face, allowing
him to untie his fingers as he gently moved his eyes over
the room, stopping at every spot that brought back memories.
“It is the same smell of long ago,” he mumbled feebly. “It
was the only thing I could never forget, for where I come
from, things are no longer recognized by their smell. There,
people wander day and night. They are made to incessantly
walk all the time, unable to return to a home, the smell and
sight of which they can no longer remember.”
He spoke like all of those who returned home after years of
being away, only to be disbelieved by everyone in the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 576
village. The journey, long and arduous, had taken away his
best years. Even his speech was no longer under his control.
Whatever he had seen had frightened him to the bare bones.
He must have returned to tell it all.
“I have returned to tell the truth, but I found the village
almost empty. The few people who have remained have failed
to take notice of my presence. The fields are half abandoned
and those that have been cultivated are full of weeds. I
tried to go down to the sacred cave but no road led to it.”
“Those who have tried to enter its sacred environs have not
returned to tell about it,” I informed him as I pulled the
quilt closer about my knees. “The peasants tell of people
who dared to enter the cave freezing like hail during a
summer storm; others have had dreams of people being
dismembered like dead twigs from a healthy tree. The elders
have for a time invoked their ancestors for guidance, but no
one has succeeded. Yes, the village has changed as all
things do.”
I noticed a certain pain that had surfaced in his face in
the form of pallor. I spoke no more that night. Rather, I
sat still, feeling the warmth of the fire as I listened to
the howling of the dogs outside.
“There is no worse pain that what one feels when he is not
recognized by his own people.” He said those words without
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 577
opening his eyes. I thought, “If he only knew that he has
come back to a village that lives through the voices of old,
perhaps his pain would be less.” Turning, I whispered, “We
all live sustained by what we remember. In the village there
are only a few of us left. One calls himself Vlasë, even
though his real name is Tuci; he refuses to leave the train
station, maybe because he has no place to go. He still sees
the station with the bell ringing for the arrival and
departures of the trains, but the fact is that the station
is no longer there. The few bricks that faced the stone
foundation were removed, one by one, by the newcomers, who
used them to decorate the entrances of their homes at the
end of Sheshi. Of course, we have not told him, out of pity.
If you want to talk to him, I believe you’ll find him
sitting by the pile of those remaining bricks which have
almost turned to dust, although I cannot tell for certain
when I last heard that he was still sitting there from dawn
to dusk.”
“It seems that not too long ago, the old-timers stopped
waiting for their children to return home from all the
places they had gone. The streets used to fill with them,
especially at the hour the train was due to arrive. There
was not a day when they did not dust every piece of old
furniture and cook an extra dish of food with the hope of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 578
eating it with their loved ones. I have longed to see those
days return. Perhaps now the others will follow you and the
village will once more become what it used to be, with the
children playing with swallows and the men humming their
favorite songs to themselves as they return from the
fields.” But I was speaking to myself, for the visitor was
no longer there. The dogs had not stopped howling, nor had
the winds ceased scratching the glass window over the
balcony.”
By morning Aristi’s mother could not decide whether the
conversation with the stranger had been real or simply
another dream like all the others. The logs in the fireplace
had turned to charcoal and the cold had placed over them
invisible white flakes. She thought of the years that had
gone by and the struggle to keep alive the waning memories.
Even talking to her own Aristi had become too difficult.
Lately he had taken refuge in a space she could not
recognize. He spent all day at the café, keeping company
with the few foreigners who came to read and reread the
letters they received from home. And at night, once home, he
searched among the piles of old photographs, sometimes
blowing warm air upon them to separate those which had
adhered to one another. “The day the foreigners stop coming
to the café, I will close it,” he told her repeatedly.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 579
And, in fact, Rini, the barber who sat under the dying
almond tree, did not have to wait long to see the café
empty. At night, not even a light was turned on in Sheshi.
“I stayed home with the pain in my legs ever more
unbearable,” recounted Aristi’s mother. “There were times
when I could not tell whether it was day or night or whether
it was the dogs or people howling. Some nights I could hear
panting right outside my door. It was then that I decided to
move the big cherry bureau against the door. I did not know
that the silence inside was to prove more fearful than the
barking of the starving dogs which seemed to originate from
the old convent on top of Sheshi.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 580
Chapter Twelve
The nun was the last person to remain in Sheshi. She moved
in circles, showing all her anger through the canine teeth
she bared. She still wore the black and white habit blessed
by Mother Superior with the waters from the fountain of the
eternal wanderer. “Here is the crucifix; it will protect
you,” the older woman had said as she placed in her hand the
key to the Church of the Dead. “Hold onto it until all those
who have left, return to stay with their dead.” The nun took
the key and placed it into the pocket in which she stored
the wax candles for the statues of each of the saints.
Frequently, she recalled making the candles for her own
grandparents, hoping that their pale flame would provide her
loved ones with a modicum of warmth.
First Sheshi baked in the unbearable heat that preceded
the harvesting of the few wheat fields still cultivated on
the other side of the winding creek. Then it was deluged by
endless rainy days which crumbled the mortar that held the
stones in place until the houses seemed about to collapse.
In spite of the many stray dogs, abandoned by their owners,
one dog was faithful. It belonged to the one who had taken
her own vows to Jesus. The dog and the nun slept and awoke
together as the sun rose. Then the dog left her briefly to
hunt the wild rabbits emerging from their hideouts in search
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 581
of dew-dampened greens. Not a day went by without the nun’s
finding the catch of the day at her front doorstep. Wild
game of all sorts were deposited there, and she soon learned
to distinguish dozens of creatures by the color of their fur
and the taste of their meat.
The nun kept her home immaculate, free of the wild grasses
and the climbing vines which had invaded elsewhere. By now
the old fountain that faced her home brought little water
from the feet of the seven mountains. The stones that formed
its basin had deep crevices, and the gargoyles on its façade
were no longer discernible. Yet, the nun could not spend a
single night without dreaming of the past life in the
village. She conversed with oddly attired women who talked
to one another in a strange language while they filled their
terracotta jugs with water. In a dream, the nun saw herself
as a child holding tightly to the long skirt of another
woman. Pondering the image as she took her place on the
front steps the next morning, the nun felt that the woman
must have been her mother. By midday, when she walked to the
fountain and leaned back against its sun-baked wall, she
easily associated its warmth with that of the dream.
For awhile, the nun was able to separate the sensations of
the nocturnal dreams from those of the day, but it was not
long before the two became inextricably linked. By that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 582
time, the dog had turned gray and lazy. She spent most of
the day curled up outside the house, opening her eyes as the
sun rose in the morning and drifting along until it set in
the late evening.
The nun came to know every house in the village on her
daily walks through the streets. The dog, aroused from its
slumber, followed far behind her. In each home the woman
heard and saw distinctive sounds and images of the people
who, although far away now, seemed somehow so close that she
could almost touch them. On one such walk, the nun became
convinced that a person is never alone whether her eyes are
open or closed. “It is only a matter of turning our
attention to the sounds and colors we think not to be
there,” she mused. It astounded her that she could have
walked the path of her life without having taken notice of
this fact.
Feeling reborn, the nun determined to find among the
thousands of faces she was seeing those of her own mother
and father. “If I can get to them, I will also be able to
see the faces of my grandparents.” She convened a long table
filled with all kinds of food and surrounded by all sorts of
relatives, young and old. They were talking and rubbing
shoulders with one another and each had eyes of precisely
the same color as those of the next. The wine, saved from
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 583
past years and hidden in the volcanic caves on the barren
side of the cliff, was brought up for the festive occasion.
At one end, the table was covered with roasted chestnuts and
dried figs. At the other, there were dried black olives
sprinkled with fresh oregano and bits of orange peel. A
seasoned olive trunk burned on the hearth to the rhythm of
the wind softly swaying the top branches of the almond
trees.
It was just a matter of time before the uninvited guests
began to arrive, each sitting in the place indicated by the
calendar on top of the wash basin. The preparations for this
final meal went on for many years and always with the same
expectation and yearning to gather the guests together
around the table.
But the noises outside, once so many and so varied, with
the passing of time became fewer and fewer. There came a
time when they were barely audible. In the year of the long
winter and heavy snows, the nun decided to kill time by
reading the pile of letters sent by someone from the village
who had gone to the land of dreams with all his family. They
were kept in the order by which they had been received, and
the penmanship was all the same. What did change from year
to year were the stamps, although they all had the drawing
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 584
of a strange bird with only one eye and wheels at the bottom
rather than feet.
The pile of letters smelled of rosemary. To lessen the
odor, the nun covered the letters with fresh basil leaves.
She read the first letter with tears in her eyes and with an
undefined sense of trepidation. On the envelopes there were
traces of other tears. They had been shed, perhaps, by
someone close to her.
“January the third.” It was the date on the longest letter.
“Waiting for the train. The coolness of the morning mingled
freely with the warmth of our breath. The silence on the
platform sharpened the sound of the bell. It had begun to
drizzle. The few trees lined the mount over the train
station bent under the weight of the frozen rain. The wait
was interminable, and the silence that had penetrated the
waiting room suffocated any desire to speak. The sound of
the bell ringing to announce the arrival of the train sent
shock waves through each of us. We said good-bye to “Uncle”
with only a handshake. Over the village, a mantle of fog and
a few flickering lights.
“The exit from the first tunnel gave us our last look at
the homes on the north side of the ravine. The houses clung
to one another under heavy sleep. ‘It would be best that you
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 585
forget this place,’ said Mother with a tone that left no
doubt about the bitterness she felt.
“The train reached the city by the sea; its size frightened
us, as did that of the big ship we boarded. (More
frightening still would be the huge waves that reduced the
big ship to a mere speck in a vast pool of water with no
horizon.)
“The crowd of passengers piled together holding onto their
luggage looked like so many sheep gathered in a circle by
the dogs before being herded into the barns. In them there
was even more bitterness and shame. Only the curiosity of
the children gazing at the tall ship with their wide eyes
hid the feeling of senselessness that enveloped those
strange looking people. No one knew where that ship with its
many round windows would take us or, indeed, whether anyone
would be waiting to receive us on the other side of the vast
ocean. The long war had turned us into desperate travelers.
Had we been able to blame someone or to do away with those
who had inflicted upon us such suffering and humiliation,
the departure would have been less painful.
“In the cabin, there were three of us. The other passenger,
whose names we never did know, was going to get off at the
Pillars of Hercules. Apparently, he was going to the end of
that vast continent, or so we heard him say as we pretended
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 586
to be asleep. The world was beginning to appear much bigger
than the globe we had at school.”
The nun, unable to make much sense of what she was reading,
carefully folded the letter and placed it among the others,
with the hope that the night and its many dreams would shed
some light on its contents. She imagined being among those
long lines of people who did not know where they were going.
It had been a long time since she had lost the desire to
take the train to the big city on top of the mountain where
they had told her the air was always clear and the water
from the fountains as cold as that which dripped from the
icicles on a clear winter day. For as far back as she could
remember she had wanted to see the long columns of trees
that followed the train and the piles of hay on the horizon
that smelled like baked bread. But the train station had
closed down before she could satisfy her desire. For years,
of the few people who still roamed the village during the
day, no one had walked the road that led to the old station.
The overgrowth of weeds and the prickly raspberry bushes
that caused wounds which would not heal had taken over that
road of sorrow along which the emigrating villagers had shed
their tears.
The only passable road left was the one that ran beneath
the long gravel pits surrounding Sheshi. It was a circular
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 587
route which began and ended at the gates of the cemetery. It
took the nun many years to find the entrance and many more
to find the exit. When she finally gathered the courage to
descend into the dark city she was surprised to see most of
the tombs empty and the pictures of the dead discolored by
the winter snows and the summer heat. Even the cypress trees
that looked straight up into the sky, brushing aside all the
clouds that ventured to pass overhead, had bent at the very
top and now looked down into the empty spaces, as if seeking
the souls that no longer ascended to the hilltop where the
cemetery was located.
Chiarina came to a startling realization. To make certain
that it was not part of a reverie, she let out a piercing
shriek. “I am all alone in this village; even the memories
of those who lived in my dreams have faded away.”
The nun started for home without bothering to close the
rusted iron gate and, with her dog leading the way, she
managed to avoid stepping upon the hundreds of snakes that
had come out to bask under the warm sun. She did not look
back. At the crossroads by the small Chapel of the Virgin of
Constantinople she made the sign of the cross. Once her eyes
penetrated the chestnut door of the chapel they came to rest
in the warm gaze of the Virgin, who seemed to cry with her.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 588
On the other side of the chapel, although largely
invisible, were the remains of the homes which had been
carved beneath the mountain. These caves smelled of the blue
grass and wild oregano that only grew on the eastern slope
of the tallest of the seven mountains.
Chiarina thought of taking good care of the rest of the
letters which she found neatly wrapped in an old newspaper
with mostly illegible dates. “If my mind does not betray me
I will look into the souls of all those people mentioned in
the letters.” She probably did not realize that within those
letters were the lives of thousands of people who, since the
beginning of time (as it was told by the ones who had seen
the paintings in the Cave of the Serpent) had come and gone
from Sheshi. “They will be keeping me company during the
rainy days of November.”
The nun dreaded those foggy days enveloped in the unending
drizzle that brought pain to her knees and made the swallows
hide deep inside the openings of the roof tiles. She
quickened her pace now, eager to reach her home and to
resume reading the letters. There was no name on the
envelopes, and she could not identify the homes to which
they had been sent.
The dog, smelling the cool evening air and wagging her tail
from side to side, ran along in front of the nun. The latter
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 589
now made a second stop at the Chapel of the Three Crosses
that stood between the village and the cemetery. She could
recall having stopped there as a little girl all dressed in
white with wings on her back. More importantly, she could
recall having accompanied the small wooden coffin with glass
on top of a young girl whom she had never before seen.
“Little Ardita came to stay with us for a little while,”
Prefti Vlasi had said. “Now she has gone back to where there
is light and where yellow birds make nests out of flowers.”
Those were the words she had heard at the sermon that day.
At home, she had asked her mother why the women were crying
and scratching their faces, some even tearing out their
hair. And it all had happened when they reached the Chapel
of the Three Crosses. The young girls, dressed entirely in
white, had been turned back while the others remained there
wailing like the wolves during the snowy nights of winter.
The strange fear that Chiarina had felt for the first time
that early afternoon had never left her. All of a sudden she
had begun to see things no longer together but constantly
separating and quickly disappearing into places she could
not see. She had spent many a sleepless night thinking that
even her family would one day no longer be there and that
she had to learn how to keep them from growing apart.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 590
Chiarina looked at the dog panting but not slowing down.
The fields, burned by the sun, were empty of trees. She held
back the tears that had amassed in her eyes and thought of
the days during which the yellow wheat swayed together with
the red poppies and whistled with the wind. The bountiful
crop was the result of the offerings made to the Eternal
Mother Earth as the hand and the hoe turned the earth to
receive the rains of the late fall. Darkness filled the
surroundings, and the sky trembled with millions of stars,
some brighter than others. The nun thought of how much it
looked like the canopy of stars that hung over the Altar of
the Virgin of Constantinople. Of the dog, she could only
hear heavy panting. The village was still far away, but she
could smell the flowers of the pomegranate trees that grew
on the hill facing the back of Sheshi. Her desire to finish
reading the letters made her hasten her steps, even though
cramps in her calves were aggravating her usual discomfort
in walking. She yearned to be able to breach the thick
silence, but not even the bell tower of the main church of
the village, the one that stood higher than any other
structure, was able to pierce it. Chiarina’s throat felt
extremely dry, and the air she was breathing was giving her
chest pains.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 591
By now, the sky had filled with a bright light that
tunneled itself towards the village. Transfixed, Chiarina
could not tell whether she was breathing or not. The homes
of Sheshi, so close yet so far away, rested on the bright
light that had descended from the sky. The fountain was
filled with women scrubbing their clothes as the men moved
to and fro among the almond trees. It was the picture she
remembered vanishing the night her mother told her: “You are
a woman now and must learn how to bear your own cross
without a whisper.” During the afternoon that followed, she
heard of the long dry seasons that burned the soil and
opened in it deep crevices. She also learned the art of
killing the babies deep in the womb. “It is a terrible
thing, but it must be done to save the others from
starvation.” The procedure was carried out without telling
the men anything. The brook of the cold waters, where the
crabs multiplied at night, was the only witness to their
deed. The burning heat of the early afternoon, when the
village fell into a stupor under the buzzing cicadas in the
olive trees, dispersed their choking laments of guilt and
relief.
“I listened with fear and trepidation to the women talk as
they mended the warm socks and woolen undershirts, extending
their usefulness a bit longer. In my dreams I can still see
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 592
my mother’s eyes creeping into mine to lessen the fear in
them.”
“The sun rises to set,” the women explained without raising
their eyes to exchange glances. They told and retold their
shared experiences without ever actually disclosing their
intimate lives. Inside, the women lived alone. “A woman, in
the absence of her man, must hold all things together,
retying them at night as the day unties them.”
The women at the fountain kept an eye on the sun. It told
them the time their men would be returning from the fields,
but Chiarina, pitched back into darkness and heavy silence,
felt that those memories were far away, as if they had
happened in another lifetime. Only the letters she had to
read impelled her to walk even more quickly. She had gone
past the Chapel of the Three Crosses and could no longer see
nor feel the presence of the dog. She imagined the canine
resting by the side of the road or quenching her thirst at
the fountain of the fig tree. That was the last night the
nun was to see her dog, even though she continued to call
for her and leave a piece of hard bread on the water bowl
for many a night afterwards. All that remained now of the
flood of light was a swarm of fireflies. Their flickering
light shone at times as brightly as the moon on a clear
winter’s night.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 593
Chiarina reached the main square and, strangely enough, she
could hear the water splashing in the basin of the fountain
as it had done so many years ago. The steps to the Church of
the Dead were covered with almond leaves and the sign over
the café door, long closed with a padlock as immense as the
one on the iron gates of the cemetery, was now standing
upright and clearly visible. “Someone must have taken the
trouble to readjust it,” the nun considered.
The air felt thinner now as it entered her lungs. A
strange, unfamiliar voice echoed all around her. It was
stronger on the street where the peasants, in the old days,
used to take their sacks full of wheat to be ground into
flour; Chiarina could imagine them now, sighing in
anticipation at the prospect of soon smelling freshly baked
bread.
But the cold wind, sending a chill through her spine,
reminded the nun once more that she was the only person left
in the village and that the letters she held at home inside
the wrapping paper were her only link both to the past and
to the days yet to come. How many days she had left to weave
together those memories she did not know. She struggled to
recall what she had learned in her year at school in order
to add a postscript to each of the letters. She wanted to be
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 594
certain that, when those who had left eventually returned,
they would find everything in its place.
Among all the voices she heard in the street, one touched
her innermost depths. Troubled as she was to find herself
uniquely responsible as the custodian of all that had been
left behind in the village, she nonetheless found a certain
odd pleasure when she contemplated, deep in the night, the
thought of the stranger who one day would pass by Sheshi and
claim her as his queen. At the same time, she was
unsuccessful in her efforts to probe the women’s
conversations she had heard as a child for clues as to what
lay in store for those who had remained in the village.
And then the unending war came, sending everyone to hide in
the caves on the outskirts of town. It was not long before
the children, whose only playthings were snakes and frogs,
grew as old as the grandparents who cared for them. The sun
ceased to shine, and the breeze off of the mountains smelled
rankly of dead animals. The caves’ humidity claimed most of
the elderly. The young girls, who heretofore had been
tending their linens and tapestries assiduously in
anticipation of the weddings which would take place when the
men returned, now found themselves reluctantly pressed into
duty as caretakers of the village orphans.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 595
It was at that time that Chiarina had found her true
vocation as a servant of the Lord…that God whom all those
people fighting had betrayed. Her confinement lasted until
she could no longer remember having been a child. On the day
that her Mother Superior opened the door of the convent and
entrusted her with caring for the dead and preparing for the
returnees, Chiarina discovered that the village, including
most of its houses, had been reduced to rubble.
Still bearing the heavy iron key to the cemetery, the nun
walked in the direction of the few remaining olive trees on
the horizon; although a pale silver in color, they had no
luster in the setting sun. How many years had gone by,
Chiarina could not calculate. She thought of checking the
tower of the municipal building but it, too, had been taken
away to be melted into bullets for the Great War. In its
place the crows had built their nests. The square was empty
of swallows, and the weeds beneath the almond trees had
begun to deprive them of their sustenance. The amount of
neglect bewildered the nun. She could sense the silence
emanating from the cracks in the shuttered windows and
locked doors; it encroached menacingly upon the streets and
claimed every wall on both sides.
It was then that Chiarina noticed the heaviness of the air
she was breathing. The chest pains she felt for the first
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 596
time that day would become a constant reminder of it. With
every step, she felt as though her lungs were sacks filling
with flour, reducing her ability to inhale deeply; the
distress, and the uncontrollable trembling which accompanied
this search for sufficient oxygen, also occurred each night.
In fact, these attacks had first begun when she had donned
the white garment with the wings and embroidered lace that
first day of spring so long ago. Her mother had advised “The
sun shines on those who believe in it; you make your
commitment when the new sun replaces the old one.”
And so she was taught that incurable diseases could
actually be cured with a simple dose of energy from that sun
which shone between the end of the shortest day and the
beginning of the longest one. The women knew this time well,
because it coincided with the end of the month when they
most felt the torment of their suffocated desires
inside
their wombs. The nights of that special week were spent
embracing the warmth of the protruding rocks, deep in the
ravine, where no man would ever venture. The rocks shone
like mushrooms. The women saw life shooting up from the
humidity of the earth. It was carried through the roots of
the trees and heard in the shrieks of those who, having died
unrepentant, could never more find their way to blessed
calmness. “The noises you hear at night are the expressions
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 597
of longing of those who have been condemned to follow an
unending chain of sounds. Their cries carve the earth which,
in turn, devours those who fall in.
Chiarina’s past memories were slowly returning. They were
painful, but they did offer her a way of understanding what
had occurred. Her parent, unable to bring her with them in
their search for work elsewhere, had left her at the convent
with the promise that at least one of them would return to
reclaim her before she became full grown. She could remember
the words they had uttered that night in the reception room
of the Mother Superior as she, alone in the adjacent large
hall, had watched the contortions of their mouths in the
scant light of the only candle. Long after, she learned that
they had been sent to a land with vast space, enough for
people to have land to till and enough food to provide for
everyone.
But soon the desire for land had taken an ugly turn. It was
called “the Big War.” In a swirl of uniforms and songs, many
people had begun to disappear from Sheshi; no longer did the
benches in the square hold idlers smiling and dreaming of
others. At the convent, children arrived daily. Some came by
themselves, bearing a letter and their few belongings.
Others were brought by soldiers whose comrades had died in
far away places, leaving behind long lines of orphaned
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 598
children. Still others had fallen from the sky in open
baskets with just a cover over them and a tag bearing the
name of a saint.
Those were Mother Superior’s happiest days. She felt that
God had chosen her to care for all those abandoned children.
She barely slept. Rising early in the morning, she would
take to the mountains in search of licorice and chicory.
Occasionally, she managed to find an egg or two, which she
saved for the children most in need. “There is enough food
in those mountains to feed the entire convent for a year,”
she assured them with a smile that soon turned to tears. She
had been waiting for this moment all her life; she knew that
she was destined to shelter the young from the adults’
follies.
But Mother Superior’s happiness ended abruptly one rainy
evening with a loud knock at the front door. Soldiers
brandishing pistols and rifles had pushed into the front
lobby and demanded, in a scarcely intelligible language, to
speak with the nun in charge. They had ordered her to
confine the orphans to the small chapel at the back of the
convent so that they might use the larger space as shelter
for their wounded. As brusque as they were, the soldiers
nonetheless carried the fear of death in their eyes; they
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 599
looked like lambs pursued by wolves in these strange lands
so far from their homes.
From that night on and for weeks ahead, loud noises could
be heard from the hills where the chestnut groves had once
been. Lightening filled the skies, and each explosion
brought more fear to the soldiers. The one who predicted
that they were all to die even seemed pleased that the end
was finally near. In a few weeks’ time the hills where the
sun rises were filled with the bodies of those who did not
make it into the convent; these decomposing corpses, washed
down the hillside in the torrential rains, were then set
upon by vultures which flopped their wide wings in the gray
sky and swooped down form all directions.
Soon after, big trucks arrived bearing other soldiers.
Gathering up the injured from the convent, they left in a
great hurry in the middle of the night, but not before
destroying the two stone bridges that connected the square
with the cemetery and the train station. During their
exodus, the sycamore maple trees which lined the way were
uprooted to make room for their heavy tanks, which cracked
the stones of the only road in the village.
“Mother Superior hid me in the cellar until the new
soldiers left. ‘Stay here and do not stir. I’ll bring you
food and water during the night.’
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 600
“I did not ask why she was placing me in the cellar, for I
knew that it was for a good reason. She came to get me after
the four streaks of light dissipated from the cellar. ‘You
may come out now. The soldiers have gone away, pursuing
those who stayed here first.’
“I told Mother Superior that I wanted to check on our
house, for the balcony faced the stone bridge. ‘Do what you
have to do,’ said the nun, ‘but come back before nightfall.’
“The village was completely empty. Those who were there
before had gone into hiding inside the secret recesses of
the caves on the outskirts of town. ‘Do not go near those
caves even if you hear voices,’ Mother Superior had
cautioned. ‘The Devil lives there.’
“A soft mist was zigzagging along the brook below the
convent as the night stood still over the few remaining roof
tops. I thought of the children, no longer there, who would
chase the swallows as the old men collected the dreams of
yesterday, breathing as softly as they could to lessen the
pain in their chests. The barber shop appeared to be as busy
as the café across the square. The tallest of the seven
mountains rested its peak on the few clouds sailing in
circles around it. Someone unseen had sown the seeds of
death. The bridge was no longer standing. What remained was
a pile of irregular rocks. The few homes next to it were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 601
severely damaged, yet ours had escaped that dreadful fate.
Even the thick glass over the door to the balcony was still
intact.
“From the top of the steps leading to the house I could see
the empty street and what remained of the mechanical clock
on the tower of the municipal building. I gathered a few
twigs to start a fire and warmed the house. It felt cold and
forgotten. Lying there motionless were the family pictures,
their eternal moments suffocated by the thin layer of dust
that had accumulated unimpeded over them.”
Chiarina recalled the day Minutza, their neighbor,
received a letter from her son. She was sitting on a straw
chair outside her door chasing the flies away. The bones of
her husband, Guarini, were being held together by nothing
more than the toughness of his skin, turned brown by the
burning rays of the sun. His eyes, two watery holes with
undecided colors on their edges, looked passively at the
empty road that ran alongside the public fountain no longer
dripping with water. Guarini sat in his usual spot, legs
crossed at the ankles, making certain that the irregular
breathing of his companion did not change the rhythm
piercing through the hot shield of the afternoon. The
minutes went by unnoticed on the backs of so many flies
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 602
buzzing around the pits of fruit lying by the side of the
street.
Minutza’s tongue moved fiercely through the side of her
mouth as she attempted to find the sounds for a cool glass
of water. Guarini had been there since the early hours of
the morning waiting for someone to pass by who could read
the contents of his son’s letter. The war had ended months
before, but the news had not yet reached the village. The
couple’s only son had volunteered so that his parents could
qualify for state aid. With the letter tucked within his
shirt pocket, Guarini arose to satisfy his wife’s thirst. He
took a quick look at the street to make certain that no one
was passing by. The cobbled stones were basking under the
sun in the company of the watchful eyes of the lizards.
Minutza drank the water in the same manner as the animals
that slaked their thirst in the cool waters of the brook,
drop by drop, holding onto the glass dancing in her hand.
Her eyes caught a glimpse of the letter falling from
Guarini’s pocket as he lowered the glass to her mouth.
The letter had arrived early in the morning when the
postman had slipped it under the door. The heat had
intensified and the flies had multiplied. From the fields
yonder, the smell of the decomposing bodies was working its
way into the village. The sky was filled with large black
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 603
birds diving into the fields like so many bats in the
dwindling sunlight of the evening. Guarini was never to know
what terrible screams had been sown in the fields where once
wheat as tall as sugar cane swayed with the afternoon
breeze. If only someone had given him permission to learn
the art of writing, to master the strange movements of the
bird feathers required to draw letters. But no. “You are
needed in the fields to provide food for the family.” His
father had to say it only once. Guarini had lived with the
disappointment since then, but he had made sure that his
only son would at least finish the first grade.
He was a sickly child who always felt cold despite the
layers of old clothes he wore to the classroom inside the
old chapel that stood beyond the bridge of the black waters.
The pungent drizzle hit his face as he walked along the
rocky road repeating the sounds of words whose meaning he
could not savor. Soaked by the freezing water which soaked
into his shoes, Pini’s icy feet numbed his legs up to the
knees. The wind slashed the grey clouds in a sky that never
ended. He longed to see the village with the chimneys
sending warm smoke into the roof tops where the doves
huddled against each other. Guarini never failed to put a
fresh log on the fire as the hour approached for his son to
descend the hill that faced their house. Pini was a tiny
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 604
figure of a boy who clung to the small notebook the
storyteller of the village had given him. “It was given to
me by my father. It will help you remember the signs of the
alphabet,” the man had said. Pini brought to mind the
pleasure he had felt that morning returning home to show his
father the gift and how proudly he carried it under his arm,
making certain that the few people he encountered in the
streets saw it too. That morning, Guarini had become
convinced that God had sent him a son who would be able to
learn the art of writing. He even shared the happiness with
the dead in the cemetery. He had asked them to watch over
his only son, their own kin. Guarini lit a candle he had
saved for special occasions. When in need, he felt compelled
to go to the cemetery, where the silence and the picture of
his father never failed to answer all his questions.
The day Chiarina left the convent to check on her house, no
one had yet passed Guarini. A large cloud had been making
its uncertain way from the top of the mountain since the
early morning hours, and it was now lying in wait over the
entire village. Streaks of light could be seen descending
from it and slowly climbing over the wall opposite the
chair. The lizards, which in the heat of the day had emerged
in search of disoriented flies, now had returned to their
crevices. Minutza had slowly closed her eyes, though her
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 605
tongue trembled furiously; Guarini was thinking of the
effort it would require to lift her fragile body without
awaking her. He wanted to avoid hearing the cracking of her
bones. His wife’s leathery face had devoured her youthful
beauty and, along with it, the smiling clear eyes that had
danced since she heard the first sound of her son’s voice.
What kept her heart beating was the expectation of his
return. Not a night went by without her dreaming of it. “The
priest was wrong to tell us at his last celebration of Mass
that the village was destined be forgotten and that the few
remaining parishioners would only live until their memories
dried up.” She repeated this phrase to her husband day after
day, even though it took away all her strength. They had
been waiting, it was said (although no one could ascertain
by whom or when) for as long as it took for an olive tree to
bring forth olives bursting with oil.
Theirs was the second home Chiarina went to see. Her heart
pounded with pity when she thought of the many years they
had been waiting for their son’s return. “The wait began on
my ninth birthday,” the nun remembered. “That special day
had stayed with me until Mother Superior hid me in the
underground room of the convent. My mother had dressed me in
the garment she had made with the flower-strewn cloth she
bought at the market in exchange for fresh figs. There were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 606
roses all over the fabric, and the biggest one fell right in
the middle of my chest. The day was bright and the sky was
as blue as the indigo that grows in early September among
the wild blackberry bushes near the silent brook. The
procession that carried the Virgin Mary with the soft smile
was about to pass by Guarini’s house. Minutza had the
balcony decorated with a purple mantle. Their son, Pini,
whose face was as white as that of the Madonna, showered the
statue with rose petals. It was the first time Chiarina had
looked deeply into his eyes and seen there mountains of
seas. But his straight hair, parted in the middle and
falling gently about his face and over his ears, revealed a
sad expression. In the evening Pini walked between his
mother and father and avoided looking at the other children
chasing one another on the road to the pine grove where they
said the souls of the dead gathered to watch over the
living. At that time, lines of men dressed in black made
fiery speeches, sending many people to hide in the grove.
Soon after, the announcement was posted on the front wall of
the municipal building. It proclaimed that attendance in the
square was required of every law-abiding citizen. “The Devil
is loose in this village.” This was the comment heard in
every house located on the other side of the wall of
silence.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 607
People began to disappear from the places they usually
occupied in the early evening hours. In the square it was
forbidden to gather in groups of three or more. The elders
sat by themselves watching the few children who dared to
come to the center of town. The youngsters no longer chased
the swallows; instead, they played with paper boats in the
basin of the fountain, which the village women now avoided.
The boats, floating in the current that led to the drain,
would flatten like the burned leaves around the almond
trees. The children and the old men in the square looked at
one another, filling the void between them with dreams and
counsel.
In the middle of the square, walking back and forth, each
with his hands crossed behind his back, a few young men in
single file fixed their eyes on the dirt road leading to the
train station. It was on such an occasion that the young man
with the pale face found himself pushed by force onto an
army truck that had descended unexpectedly upon the square.
The men on the bench later asserted that at least ten or
fifteen young men were snatched that day in the square.
Others felt that the number was much higher.
The barber, who had just finished setting chairs outside
the shop, counted twenty people, but he later admitted that
he could only see half the square. He had intended to close
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 608
early that day, but, noting the number of men walking about,
he had demurred. He had actually spent the morning and the
afternoon reading the old newspaper from front to back five
times. It was a paper they delivered to all the shops in
Sheshi. On the front page, his head shaven and encased in a
round helmet, the leader exhorted his followers with the
advice that it was better to live one day as a lion than a
hundred as sheep.
Just as he finished reading those words, the barber raised
his eyes and saw the young men like lost sheep awaiting the
dogs to gather them in a circle before returning to the
corral. “They were forced inside the truck with whips and
batons. It happened as quickly as lightning striking from
the mountains on stormy days. And, as midnight past without
the return of their sons, the village women began to wail,
waking everyone.” Black drapes lined the balconies soon
after. In the fields, the peasants began to sharpen their
tools. Others dug big holes amidst the olive trees and hid
enough dried food for the coming years. The air smelled of
death, as it would for days to come, and the old women
prayed in silence in the early evening hours.
On the walls of the municipal building tri-colored notices
began to appear with the names of those called to duty. They
continued showing up throughout the night. In the morning,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 609
other names were added only to be erased by nightfall. The
young began to appear and disappear like ants in the summer.
They left by night along the hidden trails below the gorges
of the seven mountains. In a short period of time, just
before the remaining fields were dotted with green and
yellow flowers, the streets of Sheshi became rivers of
black. Only at night one could hear the thunder coming from
distant places; yet the bright, serpentine heat lightening
did not bring any rain as it normally might have.
“In the house, Mother was busy knitting woolen shirts for
father as he sat on the balcony, fixing his eyes on each
view he could see. For more than a week they did not
exchange any words. I thought, however, that I could detect
them speaking softly at night just before closing my eyes,
overcome by sleep and by the brilliance of the stars. From
where I lay, I could see those stars chasing each other.”
‘Chiarina, do not look at the stars,” my mother cautioned
softly. “They will slide into you and take your soul away.”
“I listened to the sound of my own breathing and closed my
eyes. The next day, Mother hid every red shirt and
handkerchief that Father possessed. I understood then why
the home was being overtaken by the relentlessly growing
fear. The Black Shirts had been busy force-feeding castor
oil to everyone they found wearing red.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 610
“One night, I felt my mother’s lips on my forehead. It was
a pleasant feeling that transported me back to the days when
I first saw her face. But a few days afterwards she took me
to see the convent on top of the hill of the hidden spring
water. As a child, I had always thought that the convent was
inhabited by special people because the doors were always
closed. From the round glass window of the church attached
to it, one could hear the voices of angels just before
sunrise and again when the sun was about to hide behind the
mountains.
“The nun with the white face and long black gown sent me to
look at the flowers in the courtyard so that she and my
mother could speak frankly. As I bent to touch the flowers
without disturbing the dozens of butterflies darting from
petal to petal, I felt a strange sensation of wetness and
the certitude that my mother was no longer there. On top of
the convent walls, where the roof tiles extended beyond the
edge, the swallows were engaged in cementing their nests. I
never did have the chance to explain to Mother the strange
sensation I had felt in my body. As she left the convent,
she spoke of my duties now that I had reached the age of
womanhood. ‘Your father and I will be back as soon as we can
to call on you. Mother Superior promised me she would take
good care of you and teach you everything she knows.’
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 611
“I tried to make sense of her words by thinking of my
parents’ frequent trips to the other side of the seven
mountains to gather grain for the winter. From Father I did
not receive so much as an embrace when I was dropped at the
convent in the middle of the night with my few belongings
and the heavy metal key to our house. I do not remember
exactly how long I sat on the chair in the reception room,
but I felt many a cold and warm wind, coming always from the
gorges just below the convent. Not long after, the veins in
my hands began to throb. With the change of seasons, they
have grown thicker and lumpy.
“Now that I have returned home, I am waiting for someone to
pass by and help me get rid of all the green moss that has
invaded the outer walls of the house. I do manage to keep
the inside of the house very clean, but the wind that comes
down from the mountains at the peak of day, burning the
white stones that lined the front wall, also brought mounds
of dead leaves. The fields in the distance, where the men
once plowed the dry earth with their bare hands, had all
turned brown. The red poppies that not long ago danced with
the wind no longer sprouted. They had not been seen since
the lacerating moans of the German soldiers. The slopes at
the foot of the mountains had become deep holes, some as
wide as the nave in the Church of the Dead. Even the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 612
swallows did not come back with the coming of spring.
Perhaps they were waiting the return of the children in the
square.
“I waited for the return of the one who would claim the key
to the barber shop. I hoped that it would not be long. The
door to the shop was prey to an army of white ants that only
came out at night. I had filled each cavity with terra cotta
that I gathered in the pine grove and mixed with egg yolk
for binding, but that only lasted until the rains came, and
by the time the early flowers began to tremble among the
spots of snow still remaining, the dust from the holes had
been blown away. Sometimes I could still see the people
sitting altogether outside the café wearing their best
shirts and brightly-shined shoes.
“Ameriku was one of those men who always sat in the same
spot. He was a stranger who happened to pass by the village
en route to the city by the sea. At a card game, hoping to
double the money he had with him, he was induced to play
even the heavy silver watch he carried exposed in the front
pocket of his corduroy pants. While he was betting the heavy
metal money which few of the people present had ever seen,
the others were betting their donkeys and mules. And so he
thought that with just a few card games, he could become the
owner of half of what the village possessed. It turned out
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 613
that among those playing, there was one who had seen and
traveled as much as the stranger had. In just a few hours on
that hot afternoon in late summer, the passerby lost
everything he owned.
“That very night, the men took pity on Ameriku, and they
brought him a piece of bread and dried fruit. It wasn’t long
before he thought of putting to use his knowledge of making
sweets. Not long after, the whole of Sheshi lined up to bite
the glossy sweets of Ameriku. Word of the taste of the round
candies even reached the ears of the monks with the long
black beards who lived behind the thick walls of the
monastery on the hill overlooking the twin lakes. People
swore that they could see the monks coming out of their
cells on the moonless nights and following the scent to
Ameriku’s cave dwelling.
“One night the villagers could no longer smell the burnt
sugar. In their minds, there was no doubt which culprits
were responsible for the disappearance of the candy maker.
It was the children who took it upon themselves to go to the
monastery and demand the return of Ameriku. The caravan of
children undertook the journey; they subsisted mostly on
dried, sliced apples and figs. They climbed for days, trying
to reach the tallest of the seven mountains upon the sides
of which the white monastery perched. To their amazement,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 614
the structure, which looked more like a beehive than a place
of refuge for monks shying away from earthly pleasures,
actually moved from one side of the mountain to the other
the moment they began to climb towards it.
“Months and perhaps years must have passed since that
wintry afternoon when the inhabitants of Sheshi saw the long
line of ragged people running as fast as the children used
to run when they chased the swallows. The women were stunned
to see that each of their sons had aged more than the eldest
in the village. These cronies carried sacks of sweet candy
which they distributed freely in the square to those whose
eyes stared indefinitely at the horizon.
“The days grew longer and the nights grew shorter. The
taste of sweetness in the mouth prevented everyone from
getting a decent night’s sleep for as long as they could
remember. And remembering itself had become the art of those
people in the village who had not tasted the sweet candy.
Potion after potion was prepared with the blood of every
lizard they could catch and mix with the whites of the
doves’ eggs, but nothing seemed to break the spell of
forgetfulness induced by the sweet candy. Offerings were
made to the great serpent at the cave of the running waters
in hopes of a sign to free them.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 615
“Most were seen wandering through the tall grass of the
abandoned fields. Others climbed to the top of the cypress
trees that delineated every path within the cemetery only to
discover rows of bracelets made of pine cones tied together
with the tree sap. I still recall the words of the old
couple who lived above our house. ‘It is going to take a
lifetime to gather all the people together and bring them
home,’ the toothless old woman said to her husband, bent in
half by the years. He stretched his ear trying to make sense
of the unconnected noise coming from the direction of his
wife, whom he recognized only by her smell, which reminded
him of his mother’s garden in late spring. Yet, all he could
make out was one word: “home.”
“He looked around and saw what looked like a cross between
people and animals walking in the far-off fields as others
jumped from branch to branch. The sun slipped behind the
clouds and a steady rain began to fall. It continued to rain
for months and the old couple with arthritis sat next to the
burning log and hoped for an early spring. It had not
stopped raining since the return of the children. Those who
were aware of the passing of time continued to burn logs;
what they did not notice were the rising rivers. The water
was coming down in sheets, blurring the glass on the balcony
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 616
door and erasing the trees and houses from my view. I had
not heard a human voice since I had left the convent.
“‘You won’t have long to wait to hand the key to the person
who will be coming to the village with the last train.’ At
least that is what Mother Superior told me. ‘You will
recognize him by his curly white hair and the redness in his
cheeks. He will be waiting in front of the barber shop and
will carry an invisible suitcase that only you will be able
to see. When you open it, you will find inside the letters
his father wrote to his relatives.’
“I made certain to go down the stairs of the house and
stand in front of the barber shop before the sun began to
climb from the back of the mountain. Each day I noticed
quite clearly how much weaker I was becoming with every
sunrise and sunset; both events were equally precise and
equally indifferent. I only hoped that I would be granted
enough time to meet the visitor. At night before climbing
the ladder to my tall bed, I prayed to all the dead I could
remember to watch over me and to give me strength to endure
until his arrival.”
The next morning the sun rose earlier than usual in the
village and brought with it a new season. The bright light
revealed new shoots and bugs swirling around them. For
Chiarina, who woke up dressed as a nun without, at first,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 617
being aware of it, the bright light was total darkness. Her
eyes were able to distinguish the most minute things and
even to penetrate thick objects to see what was hidden
underneath them. The process involved breaking through the
light and the faraway visions. It was a frightening
experience that took some getting used to, for what she was
seeing could not be brought out examined under a light in a
certain place.
Chiarina was beginning to understand that she had reached
the crossroads. Even the sounds of the birds and those of
the cicadas, at the height of the day, could not be heard.
It was a silent world where shadows took the place of
objects without stumbling on one another. On the other side
of the window pane, a long road filled with people coming
and going, dressed in strange ways, moved in a straight line
as if urged by some inner fear to move faster and faster
towards their destination. They seemed to know one another.
Chiarina left the house without locking the door for the
first time. Whether she forgot or actually did not care to
lock it is impossible to know. In any case, she walked as
nimbly as all the cats that followed her. The few women who
always sat outside their homes without being seen became
hundreds in a matter of a couple of breaths. They came from
all the hideouts of the village and even from places where
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 618
it was thought that only cats lived. These women filled
every bit of the square, leaving free no more than a
straight path along which Chiarina could walk.
On the road to the fountain of the four winds on the east
side of the village, the men were busy scraping wooden
barrels for the new wine. The air smelled of crushed grapes
and the seeds forced the swallows to stop flying and to
gather. For the first time Chiarina was able to observe
their sinuous lines and admire their slanted eyes. She felt
the wind buffeting her arms as if it were urging her to
flutter them against the deep blue of the sky. She turned
around to look at the family house but could not find it.
She could only remember where all the pieces of furniture
had been placed and the terra cotta dolls she had made when
she could not find sleep in the middle of the night. The
moths had dug deep holes in them in the shape of tunnels
like the ones a child builds to extract his own fears out of
them. The punctured dolls brought tears to Chiarina’s eyes,
but the salty lines down her cheeks vanished before she
could realize what she was feeling.
The discolored wooden benches on each side of the square
were filled with a halo of sadness, and on the ground, where
the legs had rested, there was a piercing calm that was
opening unseen memories in the dirt beneath them. Around the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 619
benches, thousands of hands searched to get a grip of the
remaining veins of the wood still holding together. The sun
rose and set for days, but the clouds rushing by before it
never loosed the drops of rain for the planting to begin.
Chiarina walked towards the steps of the Church of the
Dead, not recognizing the white texture of the marble she
had known so well. The women had vanished and the square was
empty once again, just as it had been since the day she left
the convent with the key entrusted to her by Mother
Superior. The clouds had begun to move faster and faster as
if wanting to take with them the roofs of the houses that
stood in their way. The almond trees were bare of leaves and
the bark all discolored. The homes and the shops that faced
the square were padlocked. It felt as if not a day had gone
by since she was first taken to the convent. “Could it be
that those who left the village could not find their way
back?” She pondered the possibility of strange people who
passed through the village at night and moved the signs to
confound those returning home. Chiarina’s heart pounded as
she suddenly saw in the distance, on the former site of the
café, a slight figure of a man with a small suitcase under
his right arm. This shape, more of a shadow than a person,
moved decidedly towards the stone bench situated in front of
the barber shop. Chiarina followed his every movement with a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 620
growing knot in her throat. She knew without hesitation that
the visitor had finally arrived. Yet, her feeling of relief
was immediately accompanied by uncertainty. “I will know
whether he is the one the minute I look into his eyes.”
Chiarina felt the warmth of the ground and the smoothness of
the white stones that filled the path. She reached into her
pocket and felt the key. She held it tightly, tracing its
every contour. On her hands, the blue veins were swelling
and throbbing as the blood rushed through them.
The man sat with his legs crossed. Chiarina’s eyes filled
with tears, and a distant pain burned her throat. She
recognized him by the halo shining over his head and
penetrating into his eyes. “He has finally found his way
back. If only the others had waited a little longer,” she
considered. The old-timers had resisted all the invisible
messengers who had been sent to summon them to the place
where people travel from station to station. The traveler
had not changed at all. The pallor he had had since birth
was still upon him, and his hands were as white as those of
the angels in the village churches. His eyes still carried
the sadness of old and upon his cheeks two deep crevices
still bled.
“I recognized the train station by the wild berry bushes on
the front wall near the tracks.” Even his voice had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 621
preserved the shyness of his childhood. “The conductor was
annoyed with himself, for he had forgotten the name of the
train station. I could not blame him. The odor that came
down from the mountain, as the chestnut trees were tinged in
yellow, was filled with that of the decayed bodies.”
“It has been smelling like that since the moment those
soldiers came from the land of the sun and rounded up the
young German faces longing to smell the flowers on the
windows of their far away homes. For many nights, from the
convent, I could see their souls searching for the way back
home. But the planes from high in the sky had destroyed all
the bridges that connected the village with the main road.
They even deepened the crevasses that crisscrossed it.”
“Do you hear the voices of the people inside the barber
shop? It is as busy as I can remember its’ ever having been.
I rested here hoping to recognize some of the faces I took
with me when we left the village. We followed the footsteps
of my uncle who led us to the train station. Do you remember
the silent songs of the women as they filled the wash basin
of the fountain?”
“No one washes there anymore. The stones on top of the
gargoyles are crumbling with each cold wind that passes, and
the water stopped following altogether.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 622
In his face I could see the crevices growing wider and the
sadness in his eyes deepening. I tried to touch his arm, but
I could not feel it. A thin line of fog had settled between
us. I waited until the fog lifted and then I told him that I
still remembered each line he read to us from the Sacred
Book. He attempted to answer but could not find his voice.
Then I heard no more, nor could I see him, for the fog had
returned ever thicker and darker.
I found my way back home and from the balcony I watched the
rain channel its way over the glass, reshaping in so many
ways the few remaining rooftops in the distance. The fog was
lacing the droplets together as it squeezed the air from
them. When I felt the key still in my pocket, I wondered why
the visitor had not asked for it.”
Chiarina did not know that no key will ever open an
unfamiliar door. The night came to stay in Sheshi this time.
The seven mountains…those that had seen the village grow
from the caves of the furthest cliff until it reached the
tall pine trees that garlanded their feet…were enclosed in
the mantle of the starless sky. The bats scraped the wet fog
searching for air as they, one by one, fell against the
prickly needles of the almond trees.
Chiarina found herself following the long line of cats as
they nimbly climbed and jumped over puddles of black water.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 623
From the distance, the visitor, with his arms still wrapped
around the suitcase, smiled as he had the first time he was
able to recognize his mother’s eyes. He let go of the
suitcase, by now too heavy and too big to hold. He drew his
small legs up to his head and closed his eyes, unable any
longer to keep them open.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 624
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, the sun did not rise from the wheat
fields. The winds covered everything with a rain of ashes
that lasted longer than any investigator could later verify
to the satisfaction of the authorities. A fierce gale
unleashed a wave of cosmic rays filled with fallen stars.
This bright mantle covered the entire village and sealed it
from the memory of those who would never have a last
opportunity to return. All that testified to the prior
existence of that village were a few vague allusions to its
location and the strange language of its inhabitants,
preserved in one letter that had been left out of the pile
assembled before the tenement house was demolished.
A curious reader in a very distant land found the letter
one late afternoon, just as the librarian was announcing to
the few people present the imminent closing of the premises.
The fact was that the reader was attracted to the letter by
the uneven scribbling and the stamps depicting three marble
columns, in ascending order of height. Deciphering the
contents of that letter became an obsession. The atavistic
simplicity and the Spartan use of sounds in the first line
revealed a mind that had been in contact with a world whose
existence could only be revealed by the writer. High in the
sky, the moon was encircled by a grayish line that made the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 625
other half brighter than all the stars surrounding it. In
his mind, the reader considered that, at one time, the same
moon with the same exact light could have witnessed the
writing of that letter; the thought enthralled him.
Later, in the sparsely furnished room that he left nearly
empty in order to appreciate its defining contours, the
reader studied the characters used in the letter, twisted
within their own space, leaving behind un-coded messages of
unimaginable references. From the corner seat of his oneroom apartment, he glimpsed the dozens of thesauruses and
foreign dictionaries and wondered if the combinations of
those sounds present in the letter and the cool air outside
had slowly penetrated the room. The only window, with its
weather-beaten molding, had no curtains to shield it from
the outside. He heard the cars slip by as if skimming the
surface of the puddles of water, the passersby indifferent
to them.
He found those moments at night especially fulfilling. They
offset the hours spent in the office where the constant
transfigurations with long tunnels of light and windows that
reached the abyss were all pushed down relentlessly by
countless numbers multiplied by forces unknown to anyone.
The mere touch of the letter and the smell of oregano that
permeated the page awakened in him a well of indefinite
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 626
memories. “It is only a matter of sensing what is not
there,” he said to himself. “All things have a life of their
own that is never totally revealed.”
He could not recall from which book he had taken that
quotation. His mind was full of lines memorized as he moved
from one book into another with the curiosity of a child
desiring a toy never before owned. It was the same night.
The drizzling rain accumulated in all the empty spaces. The
conversation was brief and to the point: “I did not have any
time to react to the decision to stop having probing
exchanges into the nature of people.” Her carefully chosen
words precluded any possible response. Her diminutive figure
disappeared into the night, leaving behind a shivering chill
that smelled of rotten wood. “That smell is awful tonight,
and the cold, Arctic air has intensified the rain. It is
late in November and the first snows will soon be here,
sealing everyone inside their cubicles.”
He wondered if he would ever succeed in putting together
the sound puzzle hidden in the letter. In the dark recesses
of his thoughts, memories scaled up from the deep night and
mingled with the darkness, giving birth to endless shadows.
He arose from his brown chair and deposited the letter into
a safe place. The scent of oregano had acquired a velvety
aroma. “Pretty soon the whole building will be invaded by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 627
this odor.” The night was slowly making its way over the
entire neighborhood, and the street lights he was used to
seeing from the room had already been turned off.
“I have not seen her since the first change of colors in
the leaves on the tree that partially blocked her window.
The table she occupied at the coffee shop was empty.”
“She hasn’t been here for a long while,” the man with the
dark beard answered as he scrutinized me with the curiosity
of a pervert.
“I have a letter to show her,” I proceeded, hoping to abate
his smirk. He never took his eyes from the window as he
relived all these thoughts. In the many dreams cavalcading
through the depths of his mind, the image of his far away
village was like the voice of a child in a thick forest. He
relived as many of them as he could recall, trying to find
the one that could lead him back to it.
In the city, the morning appeared with a blanket of frost.
A lone seagull, its head tucked among its feathers, stood
motionless, probably disoriented by the whiteness of the
view and the nakedness of the branches. He warmed the dark
green tea he had prepared the day before and dipped in it
the few hard cookies left in the plastic bag. He felt
chilled to the bone, but he was not about to let that
prevent him from reaching the public library. As he sipped
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 628
the tea, he recalled the dream of the previous night. He had
walked endlessly on a dusty road with a full view of the
village of white-washed homes and grey roof tiles lying
supine in the distance beneath a chain of mountains, each
taller than the one before it. He was certain he had counted
seven of them clinging to one another by the waist and
inhabited by pine trees that pierced the clouds. The aroma
of oregano was growing more intense by the hour. “In a day
or two,” he inscribed in his mind, “the odor will invade
every house of the neighborhood.”
The sky grazed the tall buildings, adding to them the color
of ancient tombs. From time to time, a snow flake or two
reached the sidewalk, only to dissolve on the wet cement.
The cold wave, now almost a week old, seemed here to stay.
In the distance, the library with its two illuminated floors
seemed more inviting than the empty stores that lined the
street. People went on their way like thousands of
marionettes, each carrying a clearly coded message and
programmed to avoid bumping into the next. They stopped at
the traffic lights with the precision of a platoon marching
in review before empty stands.
At the coffee shop across from the library, the usual
patrons sat in their wonted seats. The homeless woman folded
and refolded her shawl. The tall man with the twisted
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 629
moustache occupied the corner table as he turned the
newspaper pages in hope of accounts from home.
“I told you there’s no news from Mexico,” theone sitting
across grumbled.
“At work, they told me of an earthquake in the capital, he
protested. He could imagine his wife begging for food while
trying to nurse their youngest. He sat there alone, not
noticing those who came in and out of the coffee shop. The
snow falling quietly had carpeted the sidewalks.
Zini struggled not to forget the details of the dream. In
his usual place in the library, he noticed, for the first
time, the date and the zip code on the envelope. He knew
exactly where the post office was located. It was the
building on top of the abandoned railroad tracks overlooking
the black river that ran deep and coiled with the wind. The
massive entrance to the post office faced the wide avenue
lined with sycamore trees. There the men with curls at the
sides of their temples read a miniature book and bowed to
the invisible walls that faced the apartment buildings. It
was the avenue of the well-kept tenement houses that smelled
of chicken soup. Zini recalled the talks of a distant
relative who visited his family once in awhile and whose
language was understood by only a few of those present. They
would reminisce about the old village asleep in a timeless
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 630
corner of the world that no one could ever locate on any of
the atlases. The one with the earth-colored face and sad
eyes, not different in color from those of any other who
frequented the home, spoke of long journeys to the edge of
the world. He called himself “Arbërësh.” His cryptic
language remained as much a mystery to many as his sudden
disappearance. The children present, succumbing to the need
to satisfy their curiosity, asked pointed questions as to
the whereabouts of those lands mentioned by the Arbërësh and
located beyond the narrow sea. The curiosity left behind by
the departure of Arbërësh was swept away by the strong odor
of black coffee brought over and placed on the table with
the precise number of rhythmic movements of a ritual. The
sipping of the coffee, served in copper cups, coincided with
the falling of the sun. The pinkish colors of the sky
traversed the window and settled on the faces of each of
those seated around the table. Soon after, the old
photographs would be brought out. They started with the
eldest handling them with the delicacy with which one might
caress the wings of a butterfly. Their eyes filled with
tears as they recalled the events pictured and brought them
alive from the not-so-remote past. It was this soundless
language beyond silence itself that Zini noted in the letter
years later. It lay underneath piles of bricks that once
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 631
held the tenement homes. Within the photograph the people
still carried on their endless conversations, unperturbed by
the changes in the neighborhood. Zini became convinced of
the need to reach the post office and find the name of the
sender.
“It would have to be early in the morning, for later the
lines of people waiting to receive their letters stretches
beyond the river,” the old lady in the coffee shop said
without lifting her eyes. “I have seen them with my own
eyes. They are all of a certain age, and their eyes seem to
bulge out of their sockets, not from lack of sleep, but
because of a disease no one has been able to name.”
“I remembered looking around to see with whom she was
having that conversation but I could not detect the person.
Besides, during those hours, the coffee shop was completely
empty, with the exception of the four of us: the Mexican;
the old lady and I; and, behind the counter, the bus boy,
cleaning the pots and clearing away the unused dishes.”
The next morning Zini set out to reach the post office. He
followed the meandering river until he reached the steel
bridge that connected the neighborhood of the post office
with that of the people who told stories of their past with
the saxophone deep into the midnight hour. “I was driven by
a strange desire to descend into those dark places to listen
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 632
to the laments of the white-bearded men who never lifted
their opaque eyes from the dark-stained floors.” In the
distance stood the massive post office. The snow was
continuing to fall, filling the air with old sadness which
muffled the Christmas carols audible in the boutiques’
chimes. “I thought of the Mexican at the coffee shop and the
letter he attempted to write to his wife, insisting, ‘I must
do it myself so that she knows that I am still alive and
will be returning home soon. She will recognize the
handwriting and her heart will be filled with joy, just as
it was on the day they brought the last-born for her to
hold. Soon after that last birth, her face filled with
wrinkles and her breasts stopped secreting milk. The child
lived only a week despite receiving our prayers and being
rubbed with coconut oil. Sick as she was, she buried the
baby herself one night under a full moon. From that night
on, she never slept well anymore, especially when the moon
was full.’
“I could see the sorrow settling down and sprouting roots
deep into the whites of the Mexican’s eyes. His hand
trembled as he tried to hide it underneath the table. The
busboy was putting the dishes in order and stacking the
glasses on the top rack. The cold air was beating against
the windowpane and turning charcoal black the heavy clouds
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 633
piled one against another. ‘I haven’t received one answer to
all the letters I have written to her,’ he murmured, still
not lifting his eyes. No one in the coffee shop knew where
the Mexican worked…only that he always arrived and sat in
the same place. ‘I need someone to mail this letter for me,’
he said in the tone of someone who wanted to believe he
could rely upon others.
“I will be going to the main post office as soon as the
weather breaks. I’ll take it with me.”
“But I do not know where to send it,” he admitted, for she
has never written back.” His hand trembled much more
severely, hitting the table from below and forcing the other
two present to glance our way.
“It is only a matter of time before you receive an answer
with the correct address,” I hastened to assure him.
“Besides, the post office has cut down on its personnel, and
the weather there has been creating havoc on the roads,
blocking delivery with mud-slides even burying some people
alive.”
This distressing news actually seemed to return a bit of
hope to the Mexican, although his trembling continued
unabated. He grasped the offending hand and added, “If she
is still living on the rocky ridge facing the muddy river,
the children will be able to watch the flight of the condors
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 634
as they shoot down from the sky, dipping their beaks into
the water trapped among the polished stones. One could never
be able to tell by looking at it that such a lazy river
could carry whole homes with all their animals floating on
top like disheveled wigs. When the rains began, people would
flock to the church, built on top of the hill overlooking
the few homes at the bottom to pray as they lit candle after
candle for the rains to leave just enough water behind for
the corn seeds to grow. But most of the time, their prayers
went unheard, and those who felt most acutely the pain of
each drop of rain falling were the elderly, who knew that
soon they would be left alone for their skin to dry like the
bark of a dead tree and their bellies to swell. I remember
the children holding to one another speechlessly, for their
tongues were frozen by the roaring of the waters pushing
tons of debris against the rocks as big as hills along its
path.”
The sadness in the Mexican’s eyes had turned into fear.
Even his voice seemed like that of a child lost among the
crowd.
The silence in the coffee shop filled its four walls. The
homeless woman had finished folding the newspaper and now
she turned around, as if intending to snatch a furtive
“good-bye.” The snow fell heavily.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 635
“I told you I will take the letter to the post office,” I
insisted as the Mexican prepared to leave. I hurried out
into the ice-cold air and found the streets deserted. The
snow, now almost completely ice, glittered like glass
beneath the lampposts. I recalled the feeling of loss I had
known on Sunday afternoons during the winter days of empty
streets, closed stores and half-filled buses moving with no
apparent purpose through the avenue as the dark clouds
hovered over the city dwellings. Exactly how was it that the
streets could be so empty?
“The stillness of the night was turning the frozen flakes
into sharp icicles. The softness of the letter clung to my
fingers, responding unevenly to the pounding of my heart.
The door to the tenement building slammed back, sending an
echo throughout the long corridor lined with dark brown
niches, each with an “eye” to monitor the unfamiliar. I
could feel countless eyes zeroing in from behind dark peep
holes as I walked through the passageway to reach number
thirty-three. The wind blowing against the main entrance had
sneaked into the hall, heightening the decayed stench of the
plaster and the exposed wooden beams. I barely knew anyone
in this building where the old couple lived right above me,
but I did know their footsteps. At times I could even detect
a woman’s soft cries coming down the heating pipe as clearly
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 636
as I had heard my own mother’s sobs during the last days of
her life. Those memories had kept me awake many a night.
“No one ever came to see the couple who lived above my
apartment. The old lady undertook the difficult task of
descending and climbing the stairs during the night to get
her mail in spite of the fact that she never received any. I
even asked the mailman to leave in her box any letter he was
unable to deliver, but he felt that I was asking him to
“play a dirty trick on the elderly.” His abrupt and
determined posture tempted me to be the one to send some
letters to the couple.
“I printed everything in bold letters, neglected the
signature and included stamps and a return address. Thus
began a correspondence that lasted until the old lady’s
writing became illegible. The words on the returned letters
moved with the pain of the arthritis that had swollen her
fingers to the point of numbing them completely. The first
letters spoke of their village in a faraway place. “The tops
of the mountains are always covered with dark, grayish
clouds perpetually enveloping the stone houses in a heavy
mist. The villagers are forced to move around the
labyrinthine alleys with oil lanterns. The mothers hide
their children in the caves and send them off as soon as
they are able to take care of themselves.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 637
“Twice a year, just before harvest, hordes of wild horses
with faceless riders brandishing curved swords invaded the
village, burning homes and chopping off the heads of young
men and girls who had come of age. The village’s elders were
made to watch and forced to clap as the soldiers danced with
their hands tied behind their backs and their feet barely
touching the ground. It was during one of those raids that
we escaped without even looking back, for we knew that the
mist would not allow us a last glimpse of our town.
“We walked for weeks, resting in caves during the day and
walking at night following the polished stones of the brook
that, according to the one who first discovered the outlet,
emptied into the sea of the city with the red clay roofs.
‘You will be able to see the boats that sail to a far away
place where people are made to work with machines that move
because of a simple plug attached to a wall. It is a place
where plants grow by themselves, for the earth is as soft as
the cotton flowers that grow at the foot of the mountains.
But what I remember especially well is the silence that the
people who embarked on those tall boats carried with them.’
“I still remember the smell of the bodies being burned down
below the village where the water rushing down from the
mountains finds its resting place,” the old woman wrote. “We
set out the same night. I can no longer recall the date. I
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 638
know I have written it in so many places to keep it alive
and to make certain that someone will find it when we are
gone. We are still waiting for our son to reach us. In my
dreams, I see him trying to reach the sea. But the boats
seem rusted and empty. At times, I see the ships washed by
heavy rains and ice as thick as cement digging deep
underneath. And the people keep on coming, trying to squeeze
inside the line, shedding tears that suffocate in the
throats of the old and young alike.”
The letter ended with illegible words. The door finally
opened, letting out a current of air colder than that
outside. Zini moved hesitantly towards the kitchen. He
remembered having left some dark coffee in the aluminum pot
on the counter. It was still there, still redolent with the
odor of roasted beans. On his way back from the coffee shop
he had devised a plan for the subway ride to the post
office. He had ridden the subway for years and had spent the
same amount of time trying to forget that infamous day. He
had gone along with the group from the W.M.C.A. to the zoo.
He had lingered to study the colors of the leaves, each so
different from the other. The rest had gone ahead, but he
had been unable to find a way to escape the angry shrieks of
the monkeys that jumped from branch to branch and banged at
the enclosing iron fence. The nights that followed had kept
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 639
him sleepless. He had never told anyone, not even the school
teacher who always smiled at him before he asked the same
question: “What do you want to talk about today?”
The snow outside had blanketed the window, making barely
visible the few lights remaining on in the apartments
opposite. “If it continues to snow like this, they will have
to close the post office,” he thought, but he did not pursue
the idea further. The coffee had lost a bit of its
bitterness. He placed the cup on the small table beside the
reclining chair and reached for the letter in his pocket. He
must have read it a dozen times since he had found it. Every
time he opened it, the words on the pale paper seemed to
have shifted position. The smell of some distant fields
permeated the page. On some words, droplets had already
formed and were ready to burst from inside. He thought of
visualizing the fields described in the letter in the image
of pictures he had seen in the geography books in the
reference section of the library. For a moment it took his
mind off the cold whistling wind outside the window, a wind
which seemed desperate to make its way inside. He knew all
too well, however, that the entrance to those fields lay
hidden beneath those words in the letter which constantly
shifted position, disorienting him and thwarting his every
attempt to hold onto them.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 640
“If only I could hear the sound of the soul they carry
within,” he wished as he recalled the magic of those words
in many of the poetry readings in the library. The audience
followed the rhythm of the voice like the wind moving from
leaf to leaf in search of the previous sound already
floating in the blue skies and cascading waters. The wind
had managed to infiltrate an invisible opening and to build
a bridge of dusty filaments glittering ever more brightly as
they approached the lamp posts.
The square, with four arcades on each corner marking its
entrance and filled with tall white flowers on long green
stalks, was busy absorbing the undulating crowd into every
available space. The sky, an intense blue, hovered over the
dry fields long shorn of the oval grains which had yellowed
one another with their closeness. The few clouds wandering
endlessly searched for the slanted grey eyes of restricted
tears. The words took their place over the entrances to the
homes, deep yellows and blues pasted on stones witnessing
unseen eyes over untrodden paths of deep, red wounds. The
church rested behind its closed iron gate. On the dark
volcanic stone the old woman waited for the wall clock to
strike four. Sweet, silent conversation of things of old; a
smile amidst lonely openings of a dry mouth pleading for a
drop of blessed water. The trees with hanging orange and red
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 641
flowers hosted hundreds of birds descending and ascending
with the noise of the people. In the square, an unusual
calm. Time had finally nestled in the watery eyes of the old
on the wooden benches facing the fountain. The heat was
slowly rising over the stands filled with merchandise. The
children, half naked, sat atop sheets of broken glass. A few
managed to capture the attention of the adults, most of whom
continued to move up and down the rows of canopies watched
by the forlorn looks of the strangers, memories plastered on
their wrinkled faces. The eyes of the old woman searched for
the white of the grain hidden underneath the stalks. The
leaven was about to perform its miracle as it had done ages
before, never failing to fill with wonder those present. The
smell of freshly baked bread traveled through every street
of the village, summoning the people to the square as the
town priest sprinkled the holy water over it and recited a
set of prayers no one ever understood. The young savored the
magic of the sound, thinking that it descended from the
place of blue or from music on the other side of the
mountains.
The elders related the words to those spoken by the priest
during the Sunday sermon. His menacing voice always
resonated from niche to niche until it made its way into
every house, filling adults with trepidation and causing the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 642
very young to cry out inexplicably. “There is harmony all
over the sky,” Prefti Vlasi asserted firmly, “and yet people
are lost in the labyrinth of the cave. The sun’s rays feed
the roots sprouting from the seeds, but we only see
darkness. Look into your own hearts for peace and
tranquility and you shall find it.”
No one hearing this exhortation was ever able to find an
opening through the confusion created by the sermons. The
words fell on all like heavy stones during a landslide. The
parishioners all left with their heads bowed, but they
refused to be made fun of by those who sat outside the café.
The picture of the village faded from Zini’s mind, the
women in their black dresses vanishing in the distance of
the winding roads. In the room, he felt the bitter cold.
With his eyes fixed on the icicles hanging outside the
window, he thought of the subway ride to the post office.
The last light in the tenement house across the street had
been turned off. There was darkness everywhere. While he
waited to see the first streaks of dawn, he thought of going
through the newspaper he had saved from the previous week. A
vague yearning to enter the realm of the dream lingered. It
must have been the wind still forcing its way into the room
that made him shiver like a child afraid of letting go of
someone’s hand. For the first time, he noticed the excessive
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 643
whiteness of his fingers. They were unusually small and all
crooked. He tried to straighten them, but to no avail. “It
must have been the exposure to the cold,” he managed to
think. His legs no longer reached the carpet set in the
middle of the room. He fell backwards into the receding
space of the reclining chair and found himself unable to
lift a limb. A sense of foreboding invaded him as his
memories of the recent dream receded into the dark hole of
his mind. He moved down the winding tunnel that had appeared
in the middle of the carpet. He clung tightly to the letter
he held in his pocket. Through a wooden railing he saw
bending shadows of women moving to and from the kitchen,
busy setting the table for the evening meal.
“It was the night Father wrote the letter to Sheshi’s
municipal authorities verifying the existence of Mother
Superior in the convent on the village hilltop. The night
was clear and the sky scintillated with stars. Writing a
letter was an event for the family for it brought back the
smell of jasmine that came to Sheshi with the south wind.
The inebriating aroma that followed turned our attention to
Mother, seated motionless as the clouds drifted away on the
wind. Even at a distance I felt Mother’s comforting look
settling over the house. Little did I know that one day, not
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 644
too much later, I would see the same clouds cavalcading with
the wind.”
Zini’s father asked for the calendar. He wanted to see if
the name of the Virgin of Constantinople appeared on it. He
checked every day, one by one, making certain to read the
name of the Saint allocated to each, but the name he was
looking for did not appear during the month of May. “It is
on the twenty-fifth of the month, no matter what year it
is,” his wife answered from the chair next to the window. He
took her word without questioning it, even though it puzzled
him that the Saint’s name did not appear on the calendar.
Her feast coincided with the ripening of the wheat, its
yellow grains waving long threads of gold with the clear
light of the sun. within weeks, the red poppies would begin
to stand tall among all that yellow, and the young of the
village would be filled with the strange feeling the elders
called “love sickness.”
“Do you think the people in Sheshi still strew the streets
with rose petals as they move the Icon of the Virgin of
Constantinople from her chapel to the Church of the Dead?”
“ There is no one in the village who is not born with that
memory,” his wife answered as she looked into the vegetable
garden behind the tenement house.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 645
Zini made an effort to lift himself up from the reclining
chair. The head appeared bigger than the bit of body he
could see. The people in his dream had turned into distant
shadows. He thought of the Mexican and his promise to mail
the letter. Perhaps the elderly couple would be coming down
to deliver another letter of their own. From the chair Zini
noticed an enormous pile of words. The stack was actually
larger than his own feet, which appeared improbably small.
“Perhaps with the first light seeping through the window I
will become myself again,” he hoped.
It was then that Zini realized that it was through one of
those words that he was able to see the people inside the
kitchen as if looking through the lens of a camera. He
crawled slowly towards the pile, feeling the heavy weight of
his head, which had grown abnormally large. The stack of
words cast a wide shadow. They twisted and stretched like so
many branches. From inside the pile deafening sounds
scratched their way out. Zini felt himself being sucked into
the vortex as he became entranced with the sounds, some as
pleasant as the pure chirp of a lonely bird in a blue
canvas. He tried to grip the side of his chair, but it was
useless. He fell into the bottomless tunnel of never-ending
memories. Upon opening his eyes and noticing that he could
scarcely breathe, Zini found himself traveling on a
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 646
slippery, unfamiliar road. The bitter cold that had
encircled the city and the emptiness of the room made it
impossible to confirm exactly when he fell into the blissful
daze.
Weeks later an odor unlike any other, suffocated, at first,
by the icy conditions of the city, emanated from the
apartment when the ice began to melt. The fumes of rotten
flesh began to seep through every opening. The first
premonition was felt by an old lady on the floor above. She
was about to put the finishing touches on the last letter.
It had taken her longer than usual to find the right words
that kept alive the images of old that were fast fading from
her mind. Only lately she had begun to feel the vastness of
the distance that separated her youthful dreams from the
domain of forgetfulness. Even her husband appeared to her
like a pitiful thing sitting in his usual place next to the
window. From there he followed the flight of the few
remaining seagulls and waited to see the mailman turn the
corner of the opposite building. She barely recognized him
at times. Still, she felt sorry for the poor thing on
account of the sadness that had overtaken his eyes. He spoke
little, but he rejoiced in watching the children return from
school unaffected by the long lines of adults crisscrossing
in front of them. The wife knew that the time would come
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 647
when they would not recognize one another. To combat the
scourge of time she would read the letters aloud to him
repeatedly. At times, she even saw a few tears rolling down
his cheeks.
That insignificant morning she decided to follow the putrid
stench. Her companion urged her to open the window for a
breath of fresh air, but the ice around the entire frame
made it impossible. “When I come back, I’ll put some hot
water around it to melt the ice.”
His throat was too dry to respond. In his mind, he just
wanted to hear the cries of the two seagulls that had been
swirling around the lone pine tree that grew in the middle
of the green space. “Don’t waste your time with the letter,”
he succeeded in muttering, but she was unable to hear him.
He knew all along who had been answering her letters, but he
could never gather enough courage to take the veil from his
wife’s eyes. Big changes were about to come and he was the
only one aware of them. He had seen them in his dreams for
many years and made nothing of them. He turned around to see
her close the door quietly as if to avoid disturbing him.
It was the first time since the last days of fall that she
had stepped out of the apartment. The corridor seemed longer
than usual and the steps steep and dangerous. She held onto
the railing as tightly as she could but her legs were slowly
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 648
giving up on her. She took one step at a time and moved
directly towards the place where the odor was strongest. The
fumes emanating from the partially opened door were as
distinct as the rays of the sun through a dark room. She
pushed open the door and saw an enormous head with its eyes
wide open on the reclining chair. It faced the only window
in the room. The clothes that might have covered the rest of
the body lay perfectly in order beneath the head and on the
dark red carpet.
The elderly woman moved closer, still uncertain as to what
she was seeing. It was then that she spotted the letter on
the carpet. It was altogether ordinary in color and size.
Instinctively she bent to pick it up. As she did so, she
tried not to look at the swollen head. Despite their being
grossly distorted, the features were still recognizable as
those belonging to the person she used to see from her
window as she served the afternoon tea to her husband. There
was no doubt about the letter; it was one of hers. How it
had gotten here she could not fathom. Struggling to breathe,
she moved toward the door, where she saw the mailman,
wrapped against the cold, climbing the stairs. They looked
at each other without exchanging any greetings. He himself
had been coming to investigate the odor, not suspecting that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 649
he was about to come face to face with the one whose letters
he had been delivering dutifully to this apartment’s tenant.
It was she who broke the silence. “I came down to check on
the odor,” she exclaimed. Gripping the one letter, she
noticed that the mailman held yet another of her letters.
Neither was able to say anything; the house of cards had
suddenly collapsed and both of them knew it. As they stood
transfixed, the head continued to grow in size. “I will
notify the authorities,” was all that the mailman could
manage, betraying an inner loss that would haunt him many
years after he had ceased delivering mail and had begun to
write to every address he could remember. He also found
himself alone in a grey room on the first floor of the
building his family had owned since the founding of the
city.
A sudden attack of asthma kept the old lady holding tightly
to the wooden rail that led to her upstairs apartment. She
became keenly concerned about her husband, pondering the
strange sadness in his eyes that had become exceedingly
intense. She took one step at a time, stopping as soon as
she felt short of breath. The stairs seemed so long and
steep that they almost caused her to panic, as she did many
times at night when she awoke struggling to find a whisper
of air. At times, she was even fearful of closing her eyes.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 650
Now she found them filling with tears as she contemplated
how useless her legs had become; they had walked further
than was expected in one lifetime.
She was called “Udha” and her husband was “Udhe.” During
the ensuing investigation, she had little to tell the
authorities. “My husband and I saw him from our window from
time to time, but he never lifted his head to look into our
eyes,” she would say. Udha followed the silence of the
staircase to reach her apartment. It was the same silence
she had felt in her dream the previous night as she had
found herself in an attic room with no windows in either
gable. Only the feeling of suffocation had awakened her. She
was startled to see Udhe all dressed in his coat and scarf,
brushing lint from his black hat with his sleeve. She
pretended not to see him and returned to bed after drinking
a glass of water.
Dawn had come a few hours later, but she had not heard the
usual noises Udhe made when the light reached his room. He
had spent the rest of the night in his usual seat by the
kitchen window, wearing the same suit he had saved for half
a century. The moths had riddled it so badly that the
remaining fibers scarcely held it together.
Downstairs, the men were busy fumigating after removing the
huge head with its crisscrossed blue veins in a large net.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 651
Udha could hear them complain of the stench and of the
monstrosity of that shape as they waited for an answer from
their superiors as to how to dispose of it. No one seemed to
know, for hours of searching had not turned up any
identification. Udha struggled to remember what the man had
looked like. When she reached the apartment, panting like a
dehydrated animal and hoping to get a response in the
soundless atmosphere, she told her husband, “I rarely saw
him, and even when I did, I could not see his eyes because
he always looked at the ground.”
“There is still some coffee left from yesterday,” was
Udhe’s response. He turned his head from the window and for
the first time he saw his wife as she had looked over a
century ago. She was filling her canteen with water from the
fountain of the village. Finally, the veil had fallen from
his eyes, enabling him to return to that moment for which he
had been searching so arduously. Udhe had lived with pain in
his bones for decades, but now his crooked fingers were no
longer stiff. Suddenly he could see through things with the
clarity of the first rays on an early spring morning. He
could even hear the countless heartbeats of the seagulls and
watch the leaves build sailboats over the wind.
Udha and Udhe sipped the coffee together. She could not
help but notice the youthful, clear eyes of her companion.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 652
Beyond their hazel color, she could even see the sun rising
from behind the mountains, those very mountains where, they
said, the waters changed the sand pebbles into pearls as
they reached the sea. The sailors brought news of the pearls
to the village when they came to look for the woman who
could wear them. A long line of sailors stretched from one
mountain ridge to another, even crossing the desert where
the prickly bushes grow with flowers that bleed tears of
milk.
“Stop wasting your time with those letters,” Udhe blurted
abruptly, interrupting his wife’s reverie. “There is no need
from now on to write. I shall pull down the shades at all
the windows and we will only look each other in the eyes.
That is the only thing that never changes, not even in
death.”
And that was the last time anyone else in that isolated
building with the façade of climbing iron steps was to see the
old couple. What happened to the big head that exuded fumes of
oregano was a mystery no one ever felt the need to investigate.
The letter Zini had tried to decipher was kept as evidence of
the phenomenon somewhere in the tall files in the basement of
the police station. As to the coffee shop, no documentation was
ever found that could have proven its existence. But, between
the two iron bridges that were left to corrode in the salty
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 653
winds, the post office in the South Bronx managed to withstand
the long lines of icicles from the North that crushed it, even
though its windows became targets for the few recognizable
children using the grounds as their sacred place.
The desire to mail the letter, however, did not die when the
closed door sealed the apartment of the two elders with their
secret at precisely ten o’clock on a clear winter morning. At
the same hour and unaware of it, the bus boy at the coffee shop
across from the city’s main public library was clearing the snow
from the front entrance. The day had appeared no different from
any other. The bus boy’s real name was Ashan, but very few
people knew that. He put the water on to boil for the morning
coffee. The clock marked six. There was just enough coffee for
the day. The light outside was a brilliant white with streaks of
yellow and pink serpentining over the front window.
Two blocks away, the Mexican was opening the door to the
building with the iron gate. The pile of snow was no hindrance
to his urgent desire to give the letter, written to his family,
to the man with the books under his arm. Little did he know that
the events of that day would change his life forever.
Visibly relieved, the Mexican saw the lights shining in the
front window of the coffee shop.
As was his custom, he
instinctively paused to ascertain that it was safe to enter. He
always carried with him false residency papers that provided
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 654
some safety as he pretended to walk about like everyone else in
the streets. The hours to venture out of his place of work were
carefully chosen. The streets were not yet cleaned of the snow
and the electrical wires hung low due to the weight of the ice.
The air inside the coffee shop was the same as that of all the
other days. The tables had been meticulously polished. The
Mexican took his usual place. This time he had a real reason for
being in the coffee shop. He was in possession of an object
which had the potential to draw him closer to the stranger with
the books. He gazed about, looking for the homeless woman with
the pile of newspapers, but she was not there. “With this
weather, she will certainly be here as soon as they clear the
snow from the streets.”
Ashan came with a hot cup of coffee and a small pitcher of
milk. He did not say anything. The Mexican kept on studying the
variety of colors that jumped from the sea of snow blanketing
the view as far as he could see. The dry land surrounding his
village south of the border deeply embedded in his mind had
vanished. It was the first time he had seen so much snow, much
less actually smelled it and touched it. He recalled having seen
pictures of wintry scenes in the school books. He had walked
home that day and asked his father, as they sat around the stone
table outside their straw-roofed house, where the land was so
white and if the chicalotes grew there.
“It is just across the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 655
wide desert and beyond the river that flows like an ocean.” The
answer had been as puzzling to him as the picture, which still
reflected so dazzlingly in his mind that he felt as if he must
squint.
The coffee had a bitter taste, but its warmth was pleasant.
His eyes still fixed on the street, as empty as the sky in the
middle of the night. The clock now marked a few minutes past
nine. He thought of his schoolteacher who had urged the students
to pay close attention to the English lessons that he offered
twice a week in his spare time.
“One day you will have to cross your own river to get to the
other side where people will employ you during the day and hunt
you at night.” Of course, the words had meant little then, but
the Mexican had noticed how, upon uttering them,
his teacher’s
face would redden and the veins in his neck would swell like the
worms he and his classmates dug from the swamp below the sugar
hacienda and fed to the chicalotes. During the week of
celebration for the Fatherland, the teacher would shut himself
in the house and stay there until the end of September. “We are
a people of dreamers. What our neighbors do not see is that we
were made to serve everyone else but ourselves.” The teacher’s
fiery words still resounded strong and clear as the Mexican
sipped a bit more of the coffee and glanced again at the clock.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 656
Ashan had been observing every movement of the Mexican. He
had saved the rest of the coffee for the other two. He also
noticed the unmistakable absence of the lady with the
newspapers. Without bothering to say it aloud, he hoped that she
had found a safe haven to weather the storm. The bus boy knew
his customers better than they imagined he did; in fact, he had
listened closely to their conversations. Many a night, in his
thoughts, he found himself in an empty coffee shop with no
customers to serve. When those reveries occurred, he could not
wait to open the coffee shop. The owner had not visited the
premises yet. The letter he had received announced a possible
meeting by the end of the month between the two and held a
contract without a specific date but with enough money to keep
the place open indefinitely. Three years had passed since its
arrival. Often Ashan pictured what the owner would look like:
old, with gray hair and a walking cane that sustained his right
foot, which somehow was shorter than the other. Then again, he
would imagine the owner to be as young as he was, with a
frightening resemblance that suggested that they shared the same
blood. “Whoever he is,” Ashan said to himself,” one day he will
have to come.
This was the reason that the bus boy never failed to open the
place, even
with weather as inclement as this. Somehow, each
person in that coffee shop was awaiting the arrival of a person
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 657
or an event which would change the tidings. Even outside, in the
many residences stacked upon one another like so many beehives,
everyone was waiting for someone.
The clock had moved past ten, but the Mexican had not moved
his eyes from the street that led to the public library. “In a
little while I’ll see him walking, head down and hands in his
pockets, straight to the coffee shop.” It was at that moment
that the Mexican relived the terrible event of the past year
inside the public library. Someone had tipped off the officers
of the Immigration Bureau as to the many illegals professing to
use the library and pretending to learn English even as their
black pens recorded nothing…not even a line… in their notebooks.
“They all wear the same shirt,” the librarian told the
officer who came to investigate the details of the phone call.
In fact, the one who had followed all their movements and had
even known about the phone call that led to the raid was the
very one who had become his trusted friend. “Tell your
companions to leave quickly; the officers from the Immigration
Bureau will be here soon,” he had cautioned with an expression
that could only be sincere. From that day forward, the Mexican
had felt compelled to trust him.
Yet, months of roaming outside the public library had passed
before, by a stroke of luck, the Mexican had caught sight of the
stranger, his eyes affixed to a book, in the coffee shop across
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 658
the street. The Mexican had studied the place for a few days,
noticing that the stranger from the library arrived and left at
exactly the same time each day and that the bus boy always had
his coffee waiting the minute he opened the door. Being careful
not to be seen himself, the Mexican observed him from the far
corner of the street. Finally, on the third day he resolved to
enter the premises and thank the Good Samaritan personally.
The entrance of the Mexican was an event in itself. Both
people inside, including Ashan, scrutinized him as if he were an
intruder. The fact was that, for a long time, no one else had
come to the place, but the Mexican took the scrutiny personally;
he felt their examination would last forever. He approached the
table where the anonymous man sat looking at a book and sat at
the table next to him, but his legs were shaking so that his
resolve to address him vanished. The Mexican needed a little
time to retrieve the sense of security that had been with him
before. Ashan approached and filled his cup with coffee before
he could think of what to order.
“Don’t worry about the cost; Ashan will put it on my bill.”
The stranger’s soft voice and amicable gaze gave the Mexican
enough courage to move over to his table.
“I have been waiting for a long time to thank you for the
other day in the library.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 659
“There is nothing to thank me for. I would have done the same
for anyone else. It is the only way to control those dogs with
their dark suits and dark glasses. They are trained to stay in
hiding for weeks until you people show up. Learn how to walk
like they do and avoid looking at anyone in the eyes. That is
the only way to get lost among them and not be hunted down.”
The Mexican was left dumbfounded, unable to utter a word, in
spite of having taken so long to memorize a few expressions of
gratitude. Here, he felt, was a man to be trusted. He sipped a
bit of coffee before managing in a clearly emotional tone: “I
have been working at night and hiding by day. It took me three
months to reach this place doing all kinds of dirty work.
Sometimes they paid me and sometimes they just threatened to
report me to the Immigration Bureau when I wanted my wages.”
“Well, you don’t have to run anymore. This place is the only
safe spot in the city. There are only three of us here, not
counting the busboy, Ashan, who has been waiting for months to
receive further instructions from the proprietor. I have a
feeling he will never show up. Still, Ashan keeps working like a
wound clock. In a way, we are all lucky to have this place.”
That is how it all began that distant winter’s day and, for
the first time, the Mexican could feel the ground beneath his
feet. Not a day went by without their rendezvous at the coffee
shop. It was as if some force beyond them were arranging their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 660
meetings. They came to know each other so well that they could
anticipate, at times, what one of them was thinking before it
was said. The spot they occupied defined and shaped their
behavior. Each became an open book, read and reread, until they
had discovered the most minute details of one another.
The old woman with the newspapers joined them soon after. She
came in one night to take cover from the heavy rains that were
wreaking havoc with the city. The floods which had reached every
alcove had forced many of the homeless out of their hiding
places. It was the only time the streets became populated by
those strange moles not used to the light. The old woman had
stayed outside the door for hours before Ashan took notice of
her and gestured for her to come inside. She did not appear to
take notice of the invitation until an approaching police patrol
convinced her to enter. It was a nervous moment for all of them.
Ashan served them coffee and pretended to have normal
conversations so as not to arouse any suspicion that could have
brought the men in dark uniforms. The woman did not say a word
throughout the tense moments, but she did keep track of
everything that went on outside, even if she was noncommittal
about it. Sometimes a flock of seagulls followed her; they flew
around the coffee shop for hours waiting for her to leave the
place. There was one seagull with white and small black patches
that came and sat outside the window as if to keep a watchful
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 661
eye on her. She had the eyes of a child still yearning to be
recognized by its mother.
“The man with the books got up and bade me good-night. I
followed his shadow from the window of the coffee shop until he
was no longer visible. He seemed to carry a heavy weight that
forced his right shoulder to lower slightly. The soft sound of
an indeterminate music reached the coffee shop, passed over each
table, lingering a bit, and then moved on. The sun had made its
way out of the clouds. It was an intense white, like those
balloons that swirl around the Zócalo on Independence Day. What
was lacking was the line of old people leaning against the
columns and savoring breathlessly the soft music of the red
birds. Once a year in the village I listened to the same music.
It came from the house of the widow.
She had come to the village with her husband, who was
determined to turn the dry land into sugar cane fields. At
first, the people took him very seriously, even though they did
not understand a word he was saying. But when the rainy season
came and washed away all the sugar cane, plus all the houses he
had built near a dry brook, many of the workers who had come
from nearby villages began to lose heart. The only house that
remained standing was that of the couple. It was an imposing
brick house built with the seventeen chests of gold and silver
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 662
coins which the wife had received as a dowry; it seemed to touch
the sky.
The husband spent the last days of his life convinced that he
could solve the problem of the flood by channeling the water
into the underground river. He ended up in the cantina emptying
bottle after bottle; the only pity he received was that of the
owner, who carried him home on his shoulders. The wife, who had
the fairest skin of all the women in the village, had never seen
the light of a sunny day. Instead, she spent all her years
listening to recorded music that bought tears to the eyes of all
who passed by. The village square became a place of melancholy,
providing a source of sadness for all the townsfolk which they
could not identify any more than they could prevent its
transporting them to the places of long-ago memories. The music
would encircle the village until dawn. Then, one by one, the
mules and donkeys would move in single file towards the corn and
sugar fields, hoping that the night dew might have produced some
new young shoots in the drought-parched earth.
It had not rained for eleven months. The peasants had collected
every drop of water from the few puddles that remained in the
ravines on the north side of the village. They saved the green
water to hydrate the remaining seeds. They even took those seeds
to the holy grounds of the church to be blessed. Then they
directed the young ones to plant them, thinking that their soft
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 663
hands would permit the young seeds to fall asleep in the warmth
of the earth and wake up at night with the first touch of
coolness.
At home, we were reaching the bottom of the only sack of corn
saved from the previous harvest. Father would go out in the
early evening to wait for hours for the rabbits to come out of
their holes. He always came back empty-handed.
“The earth seems to have lost its soul,” he would say to my
mother as the rest of us, nine to be precise, sat all together
in the corner of the one-room house behind a canopy made of
sugar leaves.
“It is only a matter of time before the rainy season begins. I
can feel the salt in the air as the sun goes down,” Mother
answered, making certain that everyone, especially the children,
heard. But soon after, I heard her pray to the Virgin of Sorrow
as she pretended to clear the sand from her eyes. In the village
all those who previously had provided answers in times of need
now were at a loss. The Prefti, who was receiving more attention
and entreaties, blamed the sinful life running rampant in every
home in the village. The elders, who spent their days praying
for rain and whose wrinkled faces had harvested all the years
that had gone by since the founding of the village, blamed the
soft music that came from the widow’s house.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 664
“You have forsaken your dead. Their loneliness is drying their
souls deep under the earth,” the widow told the group of women
who demanded that she put an end to her music.
“Your songs muzzle our prayers,” they retorted. The mayor, who
received the only newspaper from the truck driver who came once
a month and spent the afternoon napping under the wide guacamaya
tree in the middle of the square, blamed the people of the big
city for wasting water by taking long baths. He showed pictures
of the many shiny bathtubs on every other page of the paper. The
people looked, not knowing what to make of them. Some,
especially those who had worked on the big brick house of the
widow, noticed certain similarities with the long, oval tub they
had placed in a room filled with yellow and white towels. Others
only remembered the inebriating, sweet smells that emanated from
the dozens of bottles that took every space on the glass-topped
commode.
The drought went on for more than nine seasons. Daily I noticed
that more houses were being padlocked by whole families who left
the village in the dark hours of the night. The elderly who
remained behind enveloped themselves in deep, fretful omens.
Smoke no longer rose from many of the chimneys. Those who could
still walk only left their houses to attend evening prayers. In
no time, the bells of the church ceased to toll. At
just the
time when a lonely white cloud in the sky was trying to reach
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 665
the top of the mountain, I decided to go north toward what they
said was a river as old as the deepest memories that never dry.
In the village they said that the river flowed like the trail of
a dog in old age. Together with the mother of my children, I
went to sit under the window of the widow to dream with the
music. The people had not seen the widow’s face in years, but
they knew that she was still alive by the smell of that
particular perfume that forced each and every man to shave clean
and to put on his best white shirt every night on his way to the
main square. The men took the road that passed underneath the
window of the brick house so as to take deep breaths of that
mental elixir. In the “square” each stood against the orange
trees as they traveled through the vast spaces ripened with
dreams and aspirations that were more real than anything present
in that circular space.
The puddle of water in the fountain satisfied the burning
thirst of all the birds in the area. The men were all waiting to
hear the song seeping into the square from the widow’s room. And
even though they knew the words by heart, every time the sounds
descended onto the square to nestle on top of the orange trees
their eyes opened wider and the pounding in their hearts even
moved the bells on top of the church: “I will always remember
you with every sunset and smell your presence in the heart of
every flower. I will flow with your soul in the silence of all
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 666
the rivers that move towards the seas, memories of old, light in
the heart of darkness.”
As the men all stood there, each chased his dream on winged
boats sailing with the sounds of the song. When the moon had
reached its zenith, they would, one by one, find their way back
home only to long for the next night.
The heat of the day enveloped the sugar fields. Sheets of
butterflies flew over them, weaving filaments of sugar around
each cane. The stones on the road leading out of the village
sparkled like those polished stones left behind by the rushing
waters in the rainy season.
The yellow bus that stopped once a week at the village gate
was filled with young passengers. I took my seat next to the one
whose uncertain gaze spoke for all of us going North to meet the
winding river. It was a long, silent ride. The driver stopped
just a few times to let the motor cool. The big city lay on the
horizon with just a few scattered lights. No one could sleep and
the driver, to avoid dozing, sang one song after another.
“Hide as soon as we get off the bus,” said the person sitting
next to me. “They will rob you of everything you have if you are
caught. They are worse than hyenas. They call them ‘coyotes.’”
The bus driver stopped and then abruptly drove away without a
word. I did not see anyone approaching the station but I could
hear singing and laughter in the cantinas across a large parking
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 667
lot. I longed to be back in the village square listening to the
widow’s song with Rosita.
“When I come back, we will fill the altar with white lilies.” I
remember Rosita lowering her head without answering, knowing
that the urge to go North was far stronger than her presence.
The next morning I woke up missing all my belongings.
I spent two years working in a cantina to save enough to
convince a “coyote” to take me across the river. Rosita knew of
the failure of many who had left the village to return with a
fortune.
“We will get by with the little we have,” she had assured me
that night. “My father promised me the piece of land down by the
dry brook. It is not much but we will be able to grow the beans
and the corn we need.”
I followed her home that night like a child begging for
forgiveness, but the next morning we said good-bye. I kissed
each of the children and walked to the bus stop under the
disappearing shadow of the moon.
“They need you in the corn fields of the city by the big lake,”
said the “coyote” who picked us up in the middle night on the
other side of the river. The sky was a canopy of stars. Years
later, I received the first and only letter from Rosita.
“The village has changed a lot since your departure. The stone
road into town has been tarred. It withered most of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 668
eucalyptus trees that lined the street up to the square. The
road people venture all the way to the square, attracted by the
silence of the place and the weather-beaten doors of the homes.
Their presence has forced many to hide behind their canopy
shades. All fear for their children.
Our oldest son is growing faster than anything I plant in the
field next to the dry brook. He daydreams a lot while looking at
the two oak trees on the outskirts of the village. It will only
be a matter of time before we lose him. I decided to do house
cleaning in the next village to keep the children together and
to repair our roof. Your parents spend the day looking for you
at the bus stop; they can barely see, but they maintain that the
veil that covers their eyes will vanish the minute you get off
the bus.”
“Since I came to this place, five years have passed. I hid
during the day and worked at night whenever they came to call
for me.”
It was only when the Mexican stopped mumbling that he realized
he had been talking to himself. The thick flakes were glittering
through the shadow surrounding the light cast by the corner
lamppost. Ashan was still polishing the copper kitchen hood,
taking no more than a glimpse at his two customers. The Mexican
placed the letter in the inside pocket of his jacket and moved
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 669
hesitantly around, trying to decide whether to stay or to return
to his hiding place.
“I will be closing a little later tonight,” Ashan murmured. He
had almost convinced himself that this would be the night of the
coffee shop owner’s appearance. The city lay in a deep freeze.
All was still, with the exception of the distant sound of the
snow pattering against the window pane. Nights like this filled
everyone with dread. An inexplicable fear showed itself within a
teardrop in the corner of the Mexican’s eye.
The hour hand of
the clock moved with cold precision, paying no attention to the
emptiness of the place.
The snow, as if determined to make its way inside, was piling
up against the door. Ashan rushed to clear it, only to find the
lower layer had turned into ice, making it difficult to open the
door. The Mexican melted away in the bosom of the night. Upon
shutting the door, Ashan saw a lonely figure resting his head on
his crossed arms, in the far corner of the coffee shop. “When
did he come in?” he wondered.
Markedly ill at ease, the stranger constantly looked out of the
front window as if waiting to see someone. Trying not to startle
him, Ashan simply said, “If the snow continues to fall, we will
be snowbound for the night.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 670
From the stranger, there was no reply. Ashan decided to leave
the outside lights on. Darkness had settled over the city,
leaving a long grayish line on the horizon.
It was the first light of dawn, disseminating golden granules
on the snow that awakened Ashan, his eyes still half closed and
almost oblivious to the previous night’s storm. He placed the
last of the ground beans into the coffee maker. The gas
flickered, slowly warming the water. The sun’s rays, beaming
through the front window, mingled with the drops of water
caressing the ice below. Ashan placed the steaming cup of coffee
on the corner of the table without waking the stranger. He was a
tiny man with the face of a child nestled at his mother’s
breast. The stranger turned, sipped the coffee and peered
through the empty spots of the window pane. A fearful look swept
over his face, settling at the edge of both eyes. He stared
continuously at the clock and did not take his eyes from it
until it struck the hour. The ticking cut through the silence
like a hammer.
Later on that day, when the men in dark suits came to speak to
Ashan, the stranger was nowhere to be seen. On the seat he had
left a wrinkled envelope.
“I swear to you,” Ashan insisted, “I never saw that man before.
I just remember that it had been snowing for three full days
when I noticed him sitting at the far corner table. He was pale
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 671
and he acted as if he were being pursued. He looked like a man
with something to hide. You might say that he wore a mask of
guilt that was visible from head to toe.”
“We are looking for a rare letter he has taken from the city’s
central library,” the tallest of the three asserted. “It was
hidden amidst the pages of an ancient, rare text. It holds the
codes to understanding an old language.”
“I confess that I did see a book next to him, but I did not
make much of it at the time. I was far more taken with his odd
appearance and with the black wool hat that covered most of his
forehead. He never looked at me directly all the time that he
was here, but he constantly watched the clock.”
The same man in the dark suit asked if the other clients had
spoken to the stranger. “I told you he came in after the others
had left. Of the other three, I actually know very little.
Although they came daily to the coffee shop, they spoke very
little to one another. I suppose they were waiting for the right
moment to make each other’s acquaintance. I remember that it was
when those two trees that you see outside started to let go of
their leaves that the three of them began to come to the coffee
shop. Soon after, the one who came in with so many books began
to pay for the old lady’s coffee. The third, whom they called
“the Mexican,” came later. It was when the trees shed their last
leaves and the sky darkened. He came in on a late afternoon and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 672
sat by himself for a few days before moving closer to the table
occupied by the man with the books. It was a corner where one
could have a full view outside without being seen. Both followed
each other’s movements, making a poor effort at hiding their
objectives. The next evening the Mexican came in as if followed
by someone. It was then that I realized that he was hiding, but
from whom or why they were pursuing him, I cannot say. The fear
in his face and his heavy breathing gave him away. You ask me
why I did not notify the Immigration Bureau: I could not. The
contract I received with my letter of employment naming the
location of the coffee shop and the inventory of the premises
clearly stipulated that I was to serve all those who came in
without asking questions or volunteering any judgment about
their appearance or their conversations. Besides, they spoke
very little with one another.
The woman with the newspapers never said a word that I could
clearly make out. She mumbled to herself as she went through
every page of the stack of papers she brought. She turned the
pages over and over until the moment arrived for her to begin
folding them back again. She did that with the greatest care, as
if to lessen the pain she was feeling. Many a time I wanted to
get close to her, for she reminded me of the few photos I had
seen of my own mother, but I did not dare breach the terms of
the contract. She brought back some fuzzy memories which I could
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 673
not place. Every time I had a chance to look at her from the
counter I felt something inside my mind trying to come out, but
it always fell back into a dark, untouched recess. It was the
kind of experience I could only associate with a nightly feeling
of loneliness.
The other two, when they were all together during the hours
after sunset, used to look at the old woman as if waiting for a
gesture or a word that would link them to her. But nothing ever
came. That is not to say that their hope of getting to know her
would vanish as the sun receded. It simply moved beyond another
horizon, belonging to unknown lands. The days and nights at the
coffee shop came and went and so did the weeks and months and
each knew and longed for the presence of the other. I have to
say that making coffee for some of them filled me with a sense
of accomplishment I had never felt.”
“Somehow the owner of the coffee shop knew of the sense of
satisfaction that permeated the place. In the monthly letter he
sent, he never failed to praise my work and he even ventured to
state that I could anticipate a life-time of employment there.
That’s how it was in the beginning, before the cold air came in
and brought all those clouds that got darker by the hour.”
Ashan had forgotten to whom he had been speaking. The three men
in dark suits had left a while ago and he had not moved from his
place behind the counter. Even the hands on the clock had not
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 674
moved at all. Outside, the snow was still covered with countless
sparkling halos.
“If I could only get a word out of her,” he said to himself as
he furtively tried to catch her eye. There was so much she was
hiding beneath the many layers of clothes she wore as she moved
from the public library to the coffee shop and back to her
hiding place.
The Bureau decided to cut her movements short when she became a
nuisance to the storeowners who lined the street. Weeks before,
Ashan had noticed that her stack of papers was growing. She had
piled together pictures of trees, rivers, mountains and endless
green prairies. She would look at them unperturbed either by
others or by the constant ticking of the clock.
“It was at this time that the Mexican came rushing in and asked
me to read a letter for him.”
“I have been waiting for the man with the books to show up and
claim the letter. There is no sign of him anywhere.”
The snow had settled down, yet no one was walking about in the
streets. On that very day the old woman lifted her eyes. Ashan
could not help but notice their deep warmth. She had finally
succeeded in scattering the fear of darkness and was able to
look at things with an acceptance of the inevitable.
“It was the last time I saw her. I saved the pile of pictures
and wrapped them in plastic bags. I decided to wait for her to
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 675
come back and claim them. Now many months went by, and only two
of us remained. The Mexican still waited anxiously for the man
with the books and there was no further news of the old woman.
The sky remained filled with the same dark clouds and the snow
thickened into ice. Every now and then we heard the sirens, but
the street remained entirely deserted. The monthly letters with
the allowance had not arrived. The storm paralyzed traffic
throughout the city. I said to myself that I would have to close
the coffee shop if they were to cut the heat and electricity. I
looked at the Mexican and was filled with uncertainty;
nonetheless, I approached the table and did not hesitate to
advise him to look for the main post office uptown and find
someone there who could read the letter. He remained silent, his
gaze fixed on the threatening sky.”
“You cannot accuse me of harboring and illegal,” I remember
telling the three men from the Immigration Bureau. It was only
after long hours of interrogation under a blinding light and
with the constant dripping of ice after over my head that I came
to realize that they were actually after the owner of the coffee
shop and the man with the books.
“Has he ever shown his face on the premises?”
“No, never.”
“How did you come across the first letter with the keys to the
place inside?”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 676
“It was given to me by a well-dressed gentleman with dark
glasses and a trimmed white beard at the park bench behind the
back entrance to the public library. ‘Hold onto it and read it
when there is no one else around.’
Those were the only words he said before he moved away quickly
without even looking back once to see whether I had kept the
letter or not.”
“Did you say that he was well dressed and soft spoken?”
“Yes, you could say that. He looked like one of those who choose
words so well and make them fall so smoothly onto the page that
they turn into captivating sounds.”
“Keep your thoughts to yourself. Would you be able to recognize
him in a picture?”
“No, because he looked like all those people who come out of the
library, throw some bread crumbs to the pigeons and then go
right back in through the same door. For awhile I thought it was
the same person feeding the pigeons, for they all wore the same
glasses and had exactly the same beard. Only the way each looked
at the sky above, as if wishing to be on one of those clouds
that zoom in and out of that space, distinguished them from one
another. In just a few hours I counted over three hundred of
them.”
“Do you remember what day of the week it was when you saw the
owner of the coffee shop?”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 677
“Are you trying to trick me? You know very well that there is no
difference between one day and another, and that one always
leads into the next in exactly the same manner and precisely at
the same time. I do remember, though, that the wind blowing from
the river that freezes was bringing colder air. It smelled like
the moment before the sky darkens with rain and then turns into
so many icicles. The relentless ice storm forced everyone to
stay inside.”
“Did you yourself try to return the letter to the main post
office uptown?”
“It did not occur to me that it was against the law to receive
letters.”
“There is also a law against writing any kind of response to any
letter because they all speak of the past, and we must look into
the future to avoid strife. Members of a good society have to
think in the same way. Dreams have to be vanquished and personal
thoughts have to be eradicated.” He spoke as if he had memorized
the whole sequence of words while the other two kept a close
watch on me. It was at that moment that I decided not to reveal
where I was keeping the letter. I wished I had never opened the
door when they had come bursting in. The one seated at the end
of the coffee shop darted into the back storeroom. The three
could not have seen him, for half the front window was frosted
by the frozen rain from the previous night.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 678
“Did anyone come here before the snowstorm started?” demanded
the tallest of the three, who was clean-shaven and smelled of
the after-shave which sneaks out of the barber shops on Friday
nights. I did not know why, but a dry sensation prevented me
from answering, even though I tried to speak. I thought they had
come to close the place down, but that was not the case because
the tall one mentioned a certain letter they were looking for.
“It is a letter about this size, written in an unknown language.
It was taken from the second floor shelf of the library.”
“I knew exactly what he was talking about, for he described the
man with the books as if he had been observing a statue with all
of its parts visible before us.”
“We know he used to come by the coffee shop after the library
closed. The librarian described him as very eccentric. What can
you tell us about him?”
“As I have been telling you, he was one of the three who came in
buying coffee on credit. I never learned his name.”
“Did you ever see him holding or reading a letter that had red
stripes running across it?”
“I saw him reading a whole load of books and writing lists of
words. What those words were or what they meant, I could not
say. Then he stopped coming. It might have been the storm that
kept him locked up in his place.” The eyes of the three men were
upon me like shiny knives ready to plunge at their target.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 679
Thinking that I was seeing the end of the ordeal, I gave a
strange sigh of relief. After all, the coffee shop had become an
empty place.
“We will be watching you,” they warned. Then, as they left, they
turned off the lights on the outer signs. That was about a month
ago.
“That same evening, as I was closing the back door, I saw the
letter they had been looking for. It was like the one the
Mexican held so jealously while he waited for the man with the
books. I can still see his hands trembling like tree branches on
a stormy night. Of course, he never did come back. Nor did I
ever find out what end he had met or whether he had gone away
without a trace. I hid the letter without asking how it had
gotten there; frankly, I did not know what else to do with it,
but something about that envelope persuaded me to secret it away
until he might return to reclaim it.
I waited for weeks in the coffee shop, going through the
motions of boiling the water and mixing just a few of the coffee
beans which remained. One early morning, just as the sun emerged
from behind the clouds, I decided to go to the park behind the
public library. In the past, it would have been full of people
pacing up and down the only path that divided the space in half.
But when I reached it, I felt the loneliness of the few trees
and shrubs still under the snow. The place was completely empty.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 680
I walked back to the coffee shop with a slim hope of finding one
of the three customers. I could only see my own footsteps in the
snow. The windows of the surrounding buildings were frozen
solid. Nonetheless, the traffic light at the corner still
changed as if the automobiles were there waiting just for that.
Not too long before, the streets had been bustling with people
passing through doors which opened and closed rhythmically.
I placed the letter in the tin box under the floor of the
storeroom, thinking that, if no one claimed it, I would take it
to the main post office even if I had to close the coffee shop
for a day or two.
Ashan did not know that the subway line that reached the post
office from downtown had been closed for repairs even before the
snowstorms. The sewage lines witnessed an explosion of rats that
invaded many of the tunnels under the city. The rodents had been
starving for months, even feeding on their young to stay alive.
The steel pipes that brought water to the city from the rocky
ridges high above the wide river were frozen solid. Inside the
coffee shop, Ashan kept only one light illuminated; it was the
one near the entrance, just in case any one of the three
customers were able to find the way back. During the long night
hours, as he felt his mind receding into the depths of his
memories, Ashan knew that he had been entrusted with the coffee
shop forever. He hoped that the woman, whose eyes he still
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 681
remembered, had not felt any pain in freezing to death. He
regretted not having had the chance to ask her name or even her
origin. The only time he had been able to approach her, he had
noted that her plastic bag was full of pictures which she had
cut out of magazines. It was clear that she carried the years of
her life and those of all the people who had looked into her
eyes inside the white plastic bag which she secured with three
knots.
That night, she left the coffee shop and tried to reach her
hiding place before the streaks of darkness descended from above
the tallest of the buildings. The fog filled the streets and
soaked the air. Ashan left some coffee and a slice of bread on
the tables before he retired to the back room. It was the
beginning of many a sleepless night, during most of which he
pondered the letter. Each night he dreamed that he was falling
down a deep ravine riddled with the roots at the base of a tall
mountain. The fall, which had been growing in intensity, set the
stage for a long knife to fall from the height of the mountain
and to embed itself in his right rib.
In the morning, Ashan would check the tin box to reassure
himself of the texture of the letter. During the third week he
began to smell an indefinable odor, which he searched the
deepest recesses of his mind to identify. Dream after dream,
filed with unrecognizable images… some clear, others blurred…
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 682
revealed nothing. He decided to wait for spring to try to trace
the odor. In the meantime, the box had become an intense well of
fumes that changed the delusions into journeys of nightmares
followed by images of childhood sounds and earthy smells of
water and green leaves. In fact these wondrous smells made Ashan
laugh and cry at the same time that it lessened his desire to
find out why the heaviness of his body was slowly displaced by a
lightness as the odor that emanated from the tin box grew more
intense.
The light at the entrance to the coffee shop gave out in the
ninth week of that year and was never replaced. Ashan could not
even remember lying down in the back room. Wrapped in the gray
woolen cover and grasping his knees close to his head, he
traveled to the loneliness of the street and the traffic light
at the corner. He saw the light change from red to yellow only
to burst into a million other colors. His youthful eyes, wet
from the fresh dew of the early morning, settled along side the
softly moving waters of the brook.
The train with its serpentine white smoke gravely approached
the stone platform of the train station lined with a dozen or
more suitcases. The people, their heads covered with black
scarves, embraced each other. Not a sound was heard. Only a hand
brushed away a furtive tear, more from fear of being seen than
to wipe the pain away with a simple stroke of the hand. The
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 683
children clung tightly to the skirts of the women as they turned
their eyes to look at the white smoke of the locomotive climbing
in rings up towards the height of the trees on the slope of the
mountain. The men moved in a single line to place the suitcases
inside the luggage carriage. The elders cemented their tears on
the wall of the train station. In their passive looks lingered
the memories of the many departures and the vanishing journeys.
And still the white smoke of the locomotive kept on climbing
further, with the young eyes accompanying its elliptical
movement, cradled by the soft breeze of the early morning.
The long row of houses, with uneven curved tile roofs, lay
supine on the torso of the steep cliff. The earth smelled of
dryness and of desert herbs. In the distance, the fields all
ablaze filled the horizon with spiraling black streaks. “The
last rains came six months ago,” said one of the old people
leaning against the wall of the train station.
“They are trying to fill the sky with clouds where the water
can be trapped and brought down,” added another. A narrow dirt
road led to the heart of the village. It was the hour at which
the streets came alive with people advancing toward the square.
Each one would occupy the spot that his father and grandfather
had occupied before him. Perhaps even the others might have
stood on that selfsame place waiting for the sun to set and the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 684
mountains to rest their shoulders on the surrounding clouds that
never failed to appear as long as anyone could remember.
“In the tunnel of memories, I held my grandfather’s hand as
tightly as I could. All around me seemed so familiar. Among the
earthly faces I saw friends from my early school days.” To Zini,
they all seemed to look down shyly. It was now that he
understood the meaning of the sounds that reverberated from the
seven mountains. “This is your place,” his grandfather had told
him. “Guard it well and always remember its sound.” A strange
silence, almost like the one he had felt in the unclear recesses
of his memory, now became very clear. It was like the one he
felt at the train station when the locomotive was sucked by the
tunnel and the people sensed the pain that separation would
bring. Zini felt that silence all over the square. “I listened
to the sighs of the water from the fountain for the first time.
They resembled those of the foxes as they called for the sun to
rise at the crack of dawn. An elderly person bent by the years
called me “Zini ” and handed me a piece of brown sugar candy he
had won at a card game.
‘I came to walk you home, Zini,’ he said. Together we walked up
the steep hill. The women, standing by doors they left ajar,
followed with their eyes every step we took. I was certain that
I was in the presence of my grandfather. He stopped often to
catch his breath, although he made a pretense of tying his shoe
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 685
laces. The lines of his face had remained unchanged from the
gold and silver daguerreotype we kept at home with writing in
Pelasgian. Only a few sounds of that language remained on the
lips of several of the elders of the village. The script told of
my grandfather’s travels into unknown lands to seek a fortune
sufficient to marry his seven daughters.”
Indeed, Zini’s grandfather’s travels began with the chewing
of licorice. Its juices were believed to awaken the senses and
the soul from their torpor. The long days and dry seasons of
that time had turned the fields into deserts with surface
furrows as deep as the eye could see. The loss of crops forced
many a father to leave the village. Even the house with twelve
bedrooms in the main square had lost its luster; the whitewashed cement was crumbling into dust, exposing the ageless
volcanic stones beneath.
Zini’s grandfather’s departure was hastened by the death of
his wife. He had found her dangling from a tree on the land he
owned on the hill behind the train station. At that time, a
silent, invisible night wind had been eroding the land.
Countless rocks that, from afar, looked like so many sheep
struggling to pull up a blade of grass, had sprouted up where
once there had been wheat fields. The rains had failed to come
for years, so the bark on the trees that had once covered the
face of the seven mountains was patchy with a yellow mold that
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 686
gave off a pestilential odor. Some said that it smelled even
worse than the charred bodies of those lost German soldiers who
had died like dried butterflies, a last smile on their faces as
if they had reached home. The land and the few pines left at the
very top of the mountains knew it all. They had been here before
the people with their white woolen caps arrived from across the
choppy waters of the sea.
The newcomers had ventured here when everyone else was
asleep. Their foreheads shone like the moon on a clear winter
night, and they walked like no one else, sowing with every step
all the stories they had stored inside their minds. They
gravitated toward the empty houses, those at the very edge of
Sheshi that had been abandoned long before the first gaslight
had been introduced by the wandering man of the curly red hair
and the eyes of a cat. That was even before the time of the
cruel prince who feasted upon pheasants and bathed in white wine
to compensate for the smallpox that had covered his whole body
since birth. (His mother had been cursed by the thirst to kill
off her noble spouse.) He poisoned the main water basin that fed
every fountain in the village by filling it with the dead bodies
of his enemies. The peasants returning from the fields would
only send their mules to drink. Not much later, the peasants
found the prince’s mother bleeding to death from a suspicious
“self-inflicted” wound; she was beneath the icon of Saint
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 687
Leonard in the chapel of the forked road. For a long time the
people of Sheshi believed that the deep crimson stains on the
white marble that led to the altar was her blood. It coagulated
all year long except on the date of her death, when it became
liquid and bubbled as if in search of the sun that came through
the round window at the front of the chapel.
The newcomers, with their skin as white as milk and their
cheeks the color of rose petals, brought new songs. Soon the
freshly tilled fields below the ravine brought back many
swallows and even white owls. The main square was once again
enlivened with children chasing the birds as they followed the
sound of the bells from the Church of the Dead. As the village
came back to life, some of the women even put their flower pots
back on their windowsills and balconies.
But the children did not remain children for long. Soon they
began their daily trips to the train station. There they awaited
the arrival of anyone who, by chance, might stop in the village
with news of the cities beyond the tunnel. The young men did not
have long to wait. Those who had left the village and were lucky
enough to have found their way back knew that the
fireflies
that arrived on hot summer nights would soon take the children
away. And so it was. A long dark green column of railroad cars
came one early morning, bearing a shiny new uniform and a long
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rifle for each of the young men. Their wish to see what lay on
the other side of the seven mountains had come true.
As the train reached the tunnel, some of them looked back,
but others, too ashamed to show their watery eyes, did not dare
turn around. The long train took three days to move from one
tunnel into another carrying the young from as far away as the
lands of red clay and the mountains with the two lakes that
froze with the first cold winds of winter. Just a few of the
youth came back, after many years of hope, inside wooden boxes
that smelled of gunpowder. Their names are inscribed on the
stone obelisk facing the fountain. The people at the edge of
Sheshi would say that they had gone to the lands of their
forebears to bury the dead who had been killed by the stray
bullets of their enemies. Where the road began and where it
ended, no one could tell. They pointed with their crooked
fingers toward the site where the sun rose.
But Zini vowed until his last breath that the train had left
from where the sun set. “From the balcony, I saw the sun rise
and set until my eyes would no longer open.” That was before the
years cavalcaded over Zini’s shoulders and before he could no
longer follow the flight of the swallows around the bell tower
of the Church of the Dead.
An air of sadness settled into the village after the
departure of the young men. The windows and doors to the homes
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 689
were shut tightly with no one leaving or entering. Things went
on that way for untold years, but then, unaccountably, the red
poppies began to bloom in the hills and the swallows made their
nests in the eaves of the stone houses of the square. Next, one
by one, women appeared outside their homes mending their old
clothing. Finally, the only windows to be found still shut were
those of the big house, but this was not cause for much
speculation, for the people living there, as old as the village
itself, had rarely ever been seen to leave the house.
All the lands, from the hidden brook down to the ravine,
belonged to them. On rainy nights, those who dared to stroll in
the square heard the sounds of piercing music coming from the
balcony of the big house. It was the sort of music that filled
one’s heart with a strange but poignant feeling of loss. The
women, their eyes veiled, remembered seeing the sickly face of
the lady of the house only once, the day she came out, all
dressed in white, to receive First Communion at the main church.
The private ceremony, performed by Prefti Vlasi, brought the
family together for the last time. The grandfather, who had
built the house and had commissioned the construction of the
main fountain in the square, wore dark glasses to hide the
wrinkles that surrounded his deep, yellow eyes. Even so, his
look frightened the few peasants who happened to be there at the
time. How he had managed to become the biggest landowner in the
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village no one could recall, but the extent of all his
properties was clearly marked by the emblem that stood at the
entrance to the big house. It was a double headed black eagle
with long talons clinging to the head stone of the arch.
As a young girl, the daughter was made to play the piano
until the people of Sheshi knew by heart every note of her
repertoire. When a relentless fever took her away, the church
bells tolled all day and all night for nine consecutive days.
The piano kept on playing the same sad composition as the rest
of the family fell into a stupor and the peasants who worked
their lands waited in vain to receive permission to till. In
fact, the family members only emerged from the big house on the
first two days of November. With lowered heads, they walked to
the cemetery to light the candles over the tomb of the young
girl dressed in white. But as the years passed, fewer and fewer
of her relatives paid her tribute until, at last, one early
November, not a candle was to be seen burning in front of the
melancholy girl whose music had saddened the village for so
long. That year, even the winds that always whipped the village
in early November moved like lightening bolts criss-crossing the
ravines of the seven mountains.
The rainy season disappeared. One summer of drought was
followed by another until many in the village became convinced
that the lack of rain and the abundance of dust that rose from
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the parched fields were signals of an impending end of the
world. The decaying façade of the big house filled some with
satisfaction and others with unease. With the young making plans
to leave as soon as they discovered the train station and the
swallows withering like tender violets, one could sense the
houses clinging more and more to one another in their shared
loneliness.
“I saw you in my visions,” Chiarina had told the stranger
sitting on the steps in front of the barber shop. “Those who
leave all try to come back, one way or another.” It wasn’t long
after the first departures that the people in Sheshi began to
receive letters from lands they had not even known existed and
with the names of places they had never heard of. To them, they
sounded like the names the Prefti read from his black leather at
the book at the altar on Sundays. The village postman spent
months going through the list of people in the town, trying to
find the names of those to whom the letters were addressed. He
passed the task on to his eldest son just a few hours before
they found him dead with his head over a pile of letters and a
smile that could only be traced to that of the child held by the
Virgin of Constantinople. “The last letter arrived just before
you came,” Chiarina had told the stranger. “I found the letter
after the earthquake that shook the mountains for a full hour.”
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 692
Most of the houses at the end of the village became a huge pile
of volcanic rocks and powdery cement. The only homes that were
left intact were those carved under the mountains. Old tools
made of stone and tablets with strange writings surfaced from
the debris. They were saved by the man with the long white beard
who kept the town’s list of people. He was called “Saturi.” He
placed them beneath the altar of the church in the cemetery
where the bones of the dead were kept. “One day they will tell
us where we came from and we will be able to actually speak to
those we dream of but are as yet unable to recognize,” he
reminded everyone.
It was well known in Sheshi that Saturi turned postman but
also maintained the tablets, which he polished daily with white
vinegar. It was not long before he realized that some of the
writings corresponded with those written signs under the fresco
of Saint Leonard in the holy cave next to the well of the sacred
waters. “It is only a matter of time before I will be able to
trace every step of those who came before us at the foot of the
seven mountains,” Saturi explained to those who sat outside the
café after delivering the mail.
The years that followed made true the predictions of the
elderly in Sheshi. The volcano that overlooks the city with the
laughing waves erupted burying the people under piles of ashes.
Sheshi shook for days. Some were saying that it was a punishment
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 693
from God; others firmly maintained that it was a response to the
cries of the dead left unburied by the unending war. The village
seemed abandoned. Only those who knew how to survive on certain
roots and flowers remained.
Then one day the sky filled with balloons and attached to
them were rectangular packages. It took the people of Sheshi
weeks to collect them. Inside there was enough food to feed
those who had remained alive for months. The fruit trees began
to bloom and the smell from the flowers traveled far and wide,
for in just a few weeks those who had left began to return. Some
came alone. Others came with women never before seen. But it
wasn’t long before they began to work night and day to clear
their homes of rubble and to erect new walls and chimneys.
“I saved as many letters as I could,” Chiarina said to the
stranger. I even dug during the cool nights with the help of a
candle. I wanted to find all the letters sent by those who had
gone so far away to make a living and who were trying to find
their way back to the village. Among the pile of letters, I
found yours. It was different from all the others. The smell set
them apart. They had the odor of the oregano that only grows
along the brook at the bottom of the ravine.” Chiarina had set
the letters apart from the others; she was determined to trace
the name of the sender. In the village she found only one person
who remembered the last name.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 694
“We found each other in the trenches of the first big war. I
can still feel the mud and the cold of those long nights. The
days were even worse, for we feared the rotten air that killed
everything and everyone.” Old Ndoni was determined to delay even
his own death in order to once more see the face of the one with
whom he had shared the trench. Chiarina and Old Ndoni were the
only two who dared not leave the village. They cared for the few
animals lost in the fields and tended to the flowers on the
tombs with the few drops of morning dew they could gather.
“The last winter was just too severe for Old Ndoni to
tolerate. I found him frozen sitting on the wooden chair next to
his balcony with his eyes wide open. Next to him was a plate of
dried figs and a few chestnuts. He left no message, but I knew
that the dried fruit was for you. It was all he had to offer. We
had picked the chestnuts together late in the evening for fear
of being seen by the roaming soldiers looking for deserters.
They were hiding in the caves and the ravines and shooting at
anything that moved. The constant firing that we heard at all
hours only ended when the tanks maneuvered by the soldiers with
the dark skin and razor-cut curly hair rumbled through the
village, pushing aside the trees and the homes that stood in
their way. They fired their long guns towards the slopes of the
mountains; the cleared slopes burned long after the soldiers
left. Only the heavy rains, brought by the dark clouds from
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 695
where the sun rises, put an end to the flames. The smoke,
however, penetrated the white-washed walls of the homes, turning
them gray and leaving a smell behind that lasted well into late
spring. I buried Old Ndoni myself. I still feel the sadness I
felt as I carried his body to the cemetery. A long line of
swallows followed me like so many children struggling to keep a
straight line over our heads.”
That evening the sunset had a brown color and the moon that
followed with the first streak of black swirling in the air was
as bright as a mirror just polished of its years and the many
images it had accumulated. The houses clung to one another like
so many women wailing and tearing their hair. Even the cries of
the wolves from their den sent piercing howls through every
street. Ndoni was the last one whose memories reached deep
inside the dark cave of the sacred serpent.
For months afterwards, Sheshi fell into a deep sleep and the
swallows deserted the square. It was only on the first day of
May, as I dozed under the heat of the afternoon with the almond
trees dressed in white, that I saw the swallows busy cementing
their nests against the high walls of the Church of the Dead.
The fields beyond the silent brook were colored in pale green
and the bolts and locks on the homes and windows began to shake
night and day, trying to get loose. I sensed that things were
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 696
about to change. It was then that I saw you sitting on the steps
of the old mill facing the barber shop.”
That was all that Chiarina had managed to say to the stranger,
uncertain whether he had been listening or not. Zini, as he had
been known in Sheshi, woke up in a soaking cold sweat. The dream
had distracted his mind from the deep freeze outside the coffee
shop. The grey morning was filtering through the window half
concealed by white transparent drapes that hung on two large
nails on either side. Zini stood there struggling not to forget
the few details of the dream that followed him out of the long
tunnel of memories. For the first time in so many years he felt
an inexplicable sadness that reached all the way back to his
childhood. The woman in the dream brought back the image of his
mother. He remembered the faded green of her eyes with a smile.
On no one else did he ever see that shade. Those memories had
begun to wither long before it began to snow. The storms came a
few days after. Zini received the commission to manage the
coffee shop a few blocks from the city’s main public library.
That afternoon, he waited under the threatening sky to meet the
one with the legal title to the shop, but the rendezvous never
took place. On his way back to his rented room on the fourth
floor of the only brick building still standing among piles of
debris, he found the envelope tied to the doorknob. There was no
name on it.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 697
“If only I could have seen his face and looked deeply into his
eyes, perhaps I would have been able to see what lay ahead.” The
letter was written with the greatest care. There were only two
lines: “The first key is for the main door; the second opens the
pantry, which I have filled with the necessary provisions for
the coffee shop. I’ll be contacting you once a month.”
“At least,” Zini said to himself, “I will have a whole month to
see whether I will be staying with this commission or not.” He
had spent months, in fact almost a year minus twenty days,
looking through every newspaper for job openings. They were all
positions with vague descriptions and unfamiliar addresses. When
he tried to call either the telephone numbers were busy or the
telephones had just been disconnected. Thus, Zini was so happy
to receive that one phone call late the night before the
proposed meeting that he did not even bother to think how the
owner of the coffee shop could call with the phone line cut. The
call, which came very late at night, awakened him. He had spent
the night going through each of the job advertisements trying to
read between the lines to see if his skills were applicable. The
only asset that gave him hope was his age. “Young and ambitious;
willing to work for long hours and always available night and
day.”
Zini had refused to go for help at the governmental agency, for
fear of being placed on the list of “undesirables.” He thought
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 698
of the man with the books and the patches of white on his face
who had mentioned a detention camp on the northern ridge of the
wide river. “It is full these days with those who have failed to
find a place in the city,” he had said. “Inside the tall
buildings, there are dozens of glass elevators. From hidden
cameras they watch every movement. The order for you to appear
in front of the Commission of the Prevention Agency can come at
any time. For me, it came last Sunday morning. I had gone out to
look for a newspaper. I could not find one kiosk open.”
Ashan recalled the fear in the trembling fingers of the owner
of the coffee shop. His eyes, when he looked up, were like those
of a dying man just before he gasps his last breath. Then he
left the way he had come to the library’s park, hiding his face
with the collar of his coat. He was a tiny man walking on the
snow rapidly turning to ice. The bare tree branches busy
scraping wounds into the grey clouds hovered overhead.
Now Ashan’s dream lingered, causing his eyes to water with a
strange, uncertain feeling. He had hidden the letter inside the
steel drawer and was waiting for nightfall to reach the library.
Although he intended to leave the door to the coffee shop open
for the three customers, he was deeply concerned that the men in
black had already gotten to them and that it would soon be his
turn to fall into their trap. A lonely white cloud on a dark
canvas brought to mind the swirling array of white clouds he had
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 699
seen earlier in the day. The light air of the day was slowly
evaporating and a heavier one was settling in with the
approaching darkness of the evening. He had read the contents of
the letter. The address and description of the tenement house
left no doubt in his mind of the street and the kind of
neighborhood; it was the place of the new arrivals to the city.
The letter had retained the same sharp smell it had had when he
first touched it, and he vowed now to never permit the men in
dark suits to get hold of it. He even entertained the pleasant
vision of his customers coming back to the coffee shop once the
snow had melted.
The images in his mind kept pace with his walking. He watched
for any shadow that appeared and disappeared from each side of
the street. He found himself quite a distance from the coffee
shop. Its front lights were no longer visible. A lingering
silence had settled on the glass buildings. “I felt the air
opening lacerating wounds with every breath I took. I hoped to
reach a safe place before I ran out of air. If only I could see
one of the three customers move in the direction of the coffee
shop.” On that fateful morning, Ashan had prepared the last pot
of coffee for his customers and cleared the humidity from the
front window. “The three rarely spoke to one another, but I did
not mind. Little did I know that they would be the last clients.
Nor did I know that the owner of the premises had been watching
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 700
every move I made inside. He deceived all of us and even the men
in black uniforms looking for him.”
The cold air had nestled inside the coffee shop. A frigid air
was descending from Ashan’s eyes. He feared not being able to
return to the place. Around him there was total darkness. It had
even penetrated in the raindrops floating on top of the wind. In
the library, Zini desperately tried to attach himself to the
dream of the previous night in which the narrow streets of
Sheshi weaved with their silence garlands of dried rosemary
stalks hanging from the white-washed walls of the homes. The
corridor of windows extended their hands from one end of the
village to the other. From the balcony of a lone house came the
cry of a woman calling for the stars to knit their nocturnal
mantle. The elders had just arrived to claim their spot on the
wooden bench of the square. The almond trees lined the path and
the seven hills filled each of them with memories of old across
the vast ocean. The great serpent dove in and out of the cool
waters of the cave, sending out its life scent that gently
settled on each flower along the brook. The seeds in the plowed
fields anxiously awaited the morning rays to renew their search
for the eternal burst of light. In just a short time, the dirt
road filled with timeless faces returning to the place of their
ancestors, breathing and laboring under the same sky, time
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 701
within time, in a moment that held every other moment gone by,
and yet to appear.
Zini could not see the face of the old man sitting with his
legs crossed on the left side of the train station. The candid
smile of the elderly man in his dream was still pulsing in his
mind. The sounds that came out of the old man’s lips were
emanating from the depths of his memories. “I have been waiting
a long time for your arrival,” the cross-legged old-timer said
to Zini, who reached for the letter in his coat pocket and
handed it to him. The few people waiting to board the train paid
no attention to them. It felt as though the two were in a world
of their own, savoring the stillness of the afternoon as the
dark shadows of the clouds enveloped the homes nestled in the
village below.
The flakes of snow falling with greater intensity swept away
the veil of illusion from Ashan’s eyes. In the distance, the few
dim lights of the avenue faded in the heart of the night.
Darkness had taken over the streets of the city and had even
sneaked into every available space inside the homes. The snow
was deeper than it had ever been. He felt the coldness in his
naked feet. The effort of lifting his legs took his breath away
as he slowly carved his way out of the tunnel of obscurity. The
pain in his frozen cheeks intensified the piercing sound of the
wind which gnawed like so many teeth at the rolls of fog passing
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 702
through from street to street. Ashan lifted his eyes and the
feeble lights of the avenue seemed even further away than
before. A vague feeling of nausea was coming up through his
throat. He stopped to rest against the lamppost. Inside his
body, he sensed countless knives. He paused a second time just a
few feet ahead. This time he vomited blood. He knew it by the
smell of rotten flesh he had seen in the alleys of the lower
part of the city, a place that had been turned into a dumping
ground for the unwanted entities. How people ended up in that
place no one knew, for there was no entrance and no gate on
either side of the area. Regretting ever having left the coffee
shop, Ashan tried briefly to convince himself that he could make
it back, but a third deep pain, this time down by his groin,
forced him to hold onto a retaining wall. A feeling of disgust
and of helplessness had taken over his mind. He felt a childish
desire to cry for someone anywhere in the city, but he knew how
useless it would be. He crossed his legs as he must have done
many times before seated close to his father reciting from the
sacred book. Then, with his head lowered towards his arms, he
closed his eyes.
The body was never found due to the heavy rains that followed
the melting of the ice, which had been, someone wrote, as wide
as a whole block of city houses. The deluge lasted for many
months and the people who came to repopulate the city soon after
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 703
the sun had broken through the dark clouds salvaged only those
homes that were still standing. Among all the buildings so
heavily damaged stood the coffee shop, its lights giving off
perhaps their last glow. The lone light in the area brought
throngs of people to the place.
The strangely rectangular room was quickly declared a sacred
shrine because of the unidentifiable odor that emanated from it,
forcing those who smelled it to wander through unimaginable
lands that one would only see in
ancient books kept in glass
cases at the library of antiquities. The coffee pot and the
silverware shone with a brilliance that only a few old-timers
could associate with the sky as it had been ages ago. But by
this time it was difficult to tell night from day; both had
fused into one at some remote time in the past. People came from
faraway lands to learn how to close their eyes and travel to
distant worlds where the sun rose at a certain hour only to
vanish beyond the horizon. The process brought forth different
shades of colors that mingled incessantly at various moments of
the day, revealing unending strata of planes bulging and
pulsating with an energy that brought life to other planes. The
newcomers soon became aware of one another as they discovered
the color of their eyes and the movement of their fingers
touching other fingers. The number kneeling al around the
sanctuary grew larger by the day and even spread beyond the city
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 704
lines. Attempts were made to limit the number of pilgrims to the
city. There was even an effort at demystification of the “sacred
place,” but the infection only spread even faster than the
attempts to contain it and to eventually wipe it out.
Only one person, among all of those present in the entire city,
knew the secret inside the shrine. She had fought atrophy, the
disease of forgetfulness and arthritis, and she had been witness
to the onset of urban destruction. She had won her battles by
looking out of the window and counting and recounting all the
ships with the different flags and the people flooding
their
upper decks. She had buried and given birth time and time again
to her ageless companion, who ran out of possibilities and exits
inside their apartment and who, one early morning, had demanded
that he be placed inside the letter box his wife kept on top of
the cherry commode so that he could fight freedom by reordering
the words inside of it, thereby giving new breath to the people
living in those small spaces with walls of ink.
It was the time of the soft breeze blowing white butterflies
from the top of the few remaining trees in the city. Zamira saw
the biggest ship ever to approach the docks from the wide open
door of the ocean. The liner was taller than any other building
on either side of the river. From the top of the upper deck a
bright light reached her window unopposed by the glass. The ship
emitted an odor familiar to Zamira, no different from the one
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she had noticed on the day of her arrival to the city. Unless
her mind were playing the tricks of old age, there was no doubt
that time had finally completed its cycle.
Zamira hesitated, not sure whether to jump from her chair in
joy or to cross her hands tightly over her chest. She tried to
lift herself up, only to find that her bones had turned into
powder held together by nothing other than her wrinkled skin.
She called her husband Zamiri, hoping that he would be able to
find his way out of the maze of words in the wooden box. She
fixed her gaze upon the bright light still coming from the mast
of the ship, determined not to lose contact with it. At this
point, her mind was taking a different shape, as if it wished to
start all over again. Image after image was slowly rolling back,
filling the spool with new thread for a new start.
And it was a new beginning for Zamira and her companion. She
felt the breeze of the ocean sprucing her face. It was still
dark, and the ship’s deck seemed an extended bridge connecting
the sound of the ocean with the starry sky. Zamira recalled the
day her grandmother had told her that she had become a woman.
She had whispered the words to her after washing her body in
water scented with mint. In the village, Zamira’s father had
bribed the town official, a tiny man with thick spectacles, into
recording that Zamira was sixteen, not fourteen, as her birth
certificate attested. Admonished with a stern look that would
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 706
brook no questions, the clerk had obeyed without objecting,
other than to request that the father take the secret to his
grave, for the sake of his children. The sealed document had
given permission for his daughter to travel alone.
That year, on a rainy day in early November, Zamira, the eldest
of six children, was called aside. “I am sending you to America
to join your older sister and work for awhile so that I can
provide dowries for your other sisters. Your brother is too
young to help.” Zamira could not remember her mother dangling
from the fig tree her father had planted for her. The night
before, the mother had dusted every piece of furniture, washed
every shirt her husband owned and even spent the remaining
moments before dawn mending the one dress the little girls had.
Her husband, Viti, had left early for a nearby village, where he
had been called to write a dozen letters for the wives and
mothers to their husbands and sons working in distant lands.
Viti suspected nothing, even though, for the first time in his
life he had heard his wife Rusina wishing him a safe journey.
The sound of those startling words echoed as he descended the
ravine to the dirt road that led to the village of the crooked
houses. The homes were perched precariously on top of stones
that surfaced unevenly from underground. The people there spoke
the same language and shared the same memories with the folk of
Sheshi. The inhabitants of the village, called Sheku Kostantini,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 707
had been part of the second wave of refugees who crossed the sea
from where the sun rises.
The little money Viti had earned lay hidden inside a cotton
belt as he partook of the dried fruit and bread he carried; he
ate only enough to give him the strength to make it back home
before nightfall. Viti did not wish to be caught at the
Crossroads of the Dead after sunset. His mind had been on his
Rusina all day long, even when he was writing those letters of
sighs and tears to those who were missed in Sheku Kostantini. It
was then that he had realized that the smile Rusina had once
worn had been replaced by resignation and fear as she had turned
all her attention and care to the children. Rusina cared for
them as the doves that extended their wings to block the cold
wind from reaching their nests.
The olive groves along the slopes of Sheshi shone silvery
bright. As he made his way up the last hill before reaching the
village, Viti decided that it was almost time to harvest the
olives in his field. At the summit, he saw his neighbor sitting
on the rock that pointed towards the town. The two shared the
same piece of land left to them by their fathers. They had even
dug a deep well to find water during the long droughts brought
by the oppressive winds from Africa. But it was not he who made
Viti feel uneasy; rather, it was the sound of the bells
announcing someone’s death in Sheshi. As he neared the rock,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 708
Viti was surmising that one of the old-timers must have died
when his neighbor told him in a clear, dry tone “Rusina hanged
herself with the rope you left on the fig tree.”
Viti felt his knees buckling, but he held on, not wanting to
show any weakness. The neighbors walked home together, noticing
the doors ajar and the windows shut at each house they passed.
The stray cats his wife habitually fed with the few scraps she
could gather after cleaning the table were silent, their wideopen eyes fixed upon the entrance to the house. The day after
the burial, at which even the priest, known for his severe looks
at the faithful during Mass, had been seen wiping a tear or two
from his eyes, the eldest of the remaining daughters became the
mother of the younger ones. It was the beginning of her new
life.
Zamira, still sitting next to the window and without taking her
eyes off the light from the mast of the tall ship, now recalled
the age among the pile of letters she had found when she and her
husband had moved to the apartment. She brushed aside the
desolate atmosphere that surrounded her building, the only
standing among a pile of bricks. One of the letters even
identified the young girl who traveled alone with a tag, labeled
with her name, age and the party waiting to claim her, hanging
from her neck. Her father, Viti, had urged her not to be afraid
as he accompanied her to the train station through the wet,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 709
wintry mist that had engulfed the upper part of Sheshi. Just as
her older sister, Filumena, had before her, she had kissed her
younger sisters and brother while they were still asleep all
together on the bed they prepared every night with four wooden
planks set on four chairs. The little brother, who was still
waiting for his mother to return from the field, was never told
of her death until the day he saw her picture on an isolated
tomb in the cemetery.
It was his first trip to the sacred grounds with his
classmates and the young instructor with the blonde hair and
blue eyes who had come from the snowy mountains searching for a
place to do good deeds. Little Dunati lingered behind the rest
of the young pupils, unable to detach himself from the sad eyes
of the picture resting on the very top of the marble stone. The
teacher, whom the people in Sheshi called “Siti Cristët” because
of his sad countenance, walked back to fetch the young boy and
was startled to notice the striking resemblance between Dunati
and the woman in the picture. “She is the mother whose return
home I have been waiting for,” he said. “They told me that she
had gone to the fields and would soon return. Now I know she
will never come back, because the wall of silence in this place
will not let her.”
Siti Cristët was a new teacher in Sheshi. He did not understand
their language, nor did he know of their strange ways. On that
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day he decided to remain in the village; he signed a long
agreement with the authorities in the city where the Department
of Schools was located. He was never to leave Sheshi. Even in
his old age, half blind and bent, he would sit outside the big
stone house that stood on the road between the train station and
the first homes of the village. They said that he died with the
desire to see a winter snowstorm like the ones he remembered as
a child with all the chimneys sending waves of smoke into the
mantle of clouds. It was the winter picture he drew daily as he
waited outside to watch the sun set behind the seven mountains.
When the people passing through the village no longer saw Siti
Cristët, they spread the news that the teacher had gone back to
his mountains.
The morning after, the village awoke to find the streets
littered with pictures of the snowy mountains and smoky
chimneys, with many more yet drifting from the sky. Dunati wept
all alone on top of the hill overlooking Sheshi when he learned
of his teacher’s death. It was then that he realized that the
train station offered his only way off of the road of death.
Soon after, Viti decided to sell the piece of land where his
wife had found her own demise; he had planned to plant an olive
grove and a row of white grape vines there, together with a
vegetable garden and a fig tree, but none of this had come to
pass.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 711
Although Viti dedicated himself to his own trade, earning a
reputation as the best shoemaker in the region, for his only
son, he had chosen a more respectable trade: Dunati was to be a
barber. Lici, Viti’s friend of old, took the boy in, saying,
“Don’t worry, I’ll teach him every move I know. In no time he
will be the youngest barber in Sheshi. His hands are delicate
and his fingers, long.” Viti left the barber shop that morning
thinking of his own younger years when his father had taken him
to meet his maternal grandfather for the first time. The latter
had admonished, “His hands are not made to cut hair. Send him to
be a shoemaker.” That is how it had all begun for him
immediately after finishing the third grade. He had wanted to go
on up to the fifth grade but the cost of the school book kept on
climbing until his father could no longer afford it. “Your
signature is as clear as that of the clerk at the town hall.
There is no need for you to continue with your schooling.” And
that was that. His father was known throughout Sheshi and beyond
for never changing his mind. Viti turned around to look at his
son standing close to Master Lici in the barber shop and trying
to follow every move of the scissors. He could not help feeling
a sense of sorrow for the boy, knowing that he was far too young
to assume the burden of watching over his sisters. In his mind,
he was still trying to find the reason why the mother of this
boy had decided to sever her ties with the world. Could it have
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 712
been that he left her alone so many times as he looked for ways
to support all of them? He hurried home, avoiding anyone who
happened to pass his way.
Viti had become taciturn since his wife’s death. He felt that
the landowners of the village were all guilty of perpetuating
the conditions that forced the young and the landless to seek
work elsewhere. Little did Viti know that, centuries before,
people of his own kin had felt the same way and had traversed
the same roads so that their names would remain on earth a bit
longer. Those who complained openly were never seen again. The
servants of the landowners swore at the moment of extreme
unction that these proud men had been thrown into the well on
the slope of the fountain of the prince. The priests, bound by
their vows of silence, never made public these confessions until
the arrival of the young Franciscan monk with the long black
beard and the eagle eyes. He wore a long tan cape with a tight
white collar, and his black leather book bore the symbol of a
cross of gold. In the square, after Sunday Mass, attended by the
women and children of the village, he towered over everyone
present. He had arrived early one morning on a cart pulled by
two white oxen. He carried only a small sack and a cane curved
at the top. The women flocked around him, showing their
children, whom he blessed by softly touching each forehead.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 713
The men, sitting on the wooden benches and chairs of the café,
were silent; they pretended not to be perturbed by the behavior
of the women or the presence of the giant friar. Indeed, he was
taller than any other stranger ever to set foot in the square.
But the ones who most feared the Franciscan were the big
landowners, who peeked at him from behind closed curtains, their
faces ashen and forlorn. “Things will never be the same,” one
whispered to those standing outside the café. “It always takes
someone from outside to stir things up in Sheshi,” agreed
another, quite advanced in age.
At a slight distance, the children were jumping on one another
merrily. Of all those playing, not one of them was to ever
remember the arrival of the Franciscan friar on that cold
afternoon, even though he was destined to change their lives.
Hardly a week went by before the Servant of Christ received the
first visitor in the rectory of the Church of the Dead. She was
called Drita, and she was the widow with the velvet blue hat. A
noblewoman, she had followed the man of her dreams, who had
appeared before her as a young soldier in a red and blue uniform
and announced “I have come to take you away. I have been
searching for you since you opened your eyes.” Drita was never
to forget his shiny blue eyes and his pale face as he lifted her
to his horse with one strong arm.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 714
Three days later, they had reached the village on the other
side of the seven mountains. Below them, they could see two
circular lakes; in one of them, the image of the white monastery
at the top of a cliff swayed gently on the water. Drita had no
other clothes with her but those she wore with the blue velvet
hat, adorned with white and violet flowers.
They came just when the young wheat shoots carpeted the fields
with an intense green and the sky was filled with swallows
inhaling the inebriating odor of the wild oregano growing on the
mountain slopes. Below, where the silent brook runs hidden
between rows of tall reeds, the grapevines were trailing new
paths, panting with the desire to gather warmth from the sun.
The road leading to the main square was deserted, but the
square was filled with people who had all gathered there to
listen to the young man who spoke with the voice of a faraway
angel. From the steps of the Church of the Dead, he waved his
hands high and exhorted the peasants about their right to own a
parcel of land. His speech stirred in them dormant desires which
they thought were the stuff of dreams. He was speaking of all
the lands as far as the eyes could see as a gift from God to
anyone who felt the heartbeat of the seeds searching for the
light. Shots were fired from all directions. The young man bent
his knees and toppled to the ground, head first. A stray bullet
hit the young soldier in the back of his head. His fading blue
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 715
eyes clung as long as they could to the eyes of his beloved. In
that fatal moment, Drita could feel her soul leaving her body en
route to unknown places.
The soldier’s family took pity on her as they forcibly detached
his right hand from hers; it had taken an entire bottle of holy
water to release each finger from Drita’s hand. They would have
severed the hand from his body, but they wanted to keep him
intact for a proper burial. His mother announced, “They will be
together through all eternity. She is now one of us.”
No more was said of the matter until the arrival of the giant
Franciscan friar. Drita went to him. “My horseman Brëma stopped
to listen to the passionate young man from the top of the hill
overlooking the square; he was mesmerized by the voice. A
piercing sound carried by a sudden wind penetrated the chest of
the young speaker. His hands moved quickly to tear open his
shirt, as if he wanted to chase away the evil wind that had
clustered inside his chest. Instead, he bent his head forward
and fell to the ground. Brëma spurred his horse to a gallop in
the direction of the square. This time, the razor-like sound
came from behind and struck him in the head. Another bullet hit
the leg of the horse. Brëma did not even have time to call his
mother’s name. There was only one witness, a little child no
older than those who receive First Communion; he swore that he
had seen a rifle shine like a bright star in the direction of
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 716
the chestnut grove, but the authorities dismissed his account.
‘He has been seeing strange things ever since his mother took
her own life,’ the civil guard sniffed at the wake. But Brëma’s
mother had waited at the entrance to the village to warn her son
of the impending danger of the gathering. In her dreams, Zëmbra
had seen a white horse falling through a steep ravine, but she
had not been able to see the rider’s face. She told and retold
her fateful dream to her lifeless son as she beat her chest with
her fists. In her eyes, one could see the pain of the Virgin
Mary searching for her son after he had been condemned to death.
“The sisters and I sat together in the corner of the dark room,
knowing that for years to come, we would never venture outside
the house again.
For months, I thought of accepting my lot, but
the desire to avenge the death of my beloved Brëma and bring the
guilty to justice caused me to leave the house of Mother Zëmbra.
I was determined to find out what everyone else already seemed
to know. I could see it in their faces as I walked through every
street of the village trying to smell the guilt on them.
“The trail led me to the house of the closed doors. It is the
large stone building facing the Church of the Dead; its main
entrance faces the altar. “You must have seen it at your first
sermon, for the residents sat on the balcony listening to your
words. In the village, they told me that none of the family
members had left their house to attend church since their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 717
daughter’s death. They are the only ones in Sheshë who refuse to
speak the language of the village. The land that you see from
the bell tower of your church, both to the left and to the
right, is theirs. The few elders who remain, in their lucid
moments, will tell you that the family took that land by force,
threatening anyone who dared oppose them. It was said that the
stealing of the land went on for generations until the young
found the way to get to the train station. Only afterwards did I
learn that my beloved had joined the cavalry to put an end to
this abuse. Of course, Brëma did not imagine that it would be
his undoing.”
The Franciscan friar pulled his robe closer to cover his legs.
The cold wind whistling outside had found its way into the
rectory. Now it became clear to him why the bishop had chosen
him to go find the village across the seven mountains. “Your
faith and your strength will save the people of Sheshi. The Holy
See will be watching you; all is visible from the walls of the
White City.” The friar met Drita’s eyes for the first time as he
lifted his own. He saw the expression of a child as lost as he
was in these distant lands amidst a people whose ways and tongue
were of unknown ages. In all the books he had read and
translated in order to interpret, he had not come across sounds
like those he could hear from the women whispering behind their
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 718
black shawls. “I was sent here by my superior to put an end to
these injustices in the name of Saint Francis.”
“It will take more than the mere mention of the Saint to change
things in this village,” Drita admonished without taking her
eyes from his.
“I know your pain is unlike any other, for you have been
deprived of the only joy of life.”
“The difference between you and me, Father, is that you have
two cheeks to turn, and I, none.” With these words, Drita got up
and bid good day to the friar. She walked past the altar without
kneeling or making the sign of the cross. It was at that moment
that the Franciscan realized the difficult days that lay ahead.
Determined to pay the family a visit as soon as the fog lifted,
he opened his missal and began to read aloud, as he always did.
He was hoping to hear the voice of the Lord mingling with his.
He thought of the fervor of his youth and the knot that would
form in his throat every time he recited the word of the Lord.
He was convinced that, if people could only see the truth so
clearly revealed in the holy words, there would be no place for
the Devil to lodge in the village.
He arose to open the window to look at the sky. In his mind he
saw a night filled with angels eager to fly back home with the
thoughts of those desirous of the light of Heaven. An intense
moon, briefly visible, channeled its eye on every living thing
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 719
below. The friar thought of his own village with archways that
connected the houses, and he felt an affinity to those shepherds
who tended their flocks.
The next day, having knelt on the altar and asked for strength
and wisdom, the Franciscan chose the hour when most of the men
of Sheshi were in the fields to pay his repects to the
Paternoster family. In the intense heat, flies swarmed around
the few dried peppers and tomatoes still hanging at the front
entrance to each home. The friar was accustomed to taking long
walks during which he would study the intimate details of all
that his eyes found in order to clear his mind. In the square,
just a few old-timers, perhaps too tired to walk back home, sat
silently. The friar decided to go into the house through the
back door, thinking it best to avoid encountering anyone whose
suspicion could be aroused. His visit was a very delicate matter
that demanded the right choice of words and gestures. He
recalled his Superior’s warning: “Remember, they fear no one,
not even the Creator.” Beneath the friar’s big stature, there
was a fearful child.
An elderly woman, crocheting outside her home, lifted her head
and waved to the friar. On her door was a wooden crucifix
encircled by an olive branch, which the Franciscan assumed had
been there since Easter. Gathering all the strength he could to
lift the heavy steel door knocker, the friar rapped three times
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 720
before the door was opened a crack. The old servant who had been
born in the house barely showed her face. When, forcing a smile,
the friar told her that he had come to pay his respects to the
family, he found the door shut in his face as the servant went
to tell her master. Turning around, he saw that his observer had
turned her back on him. He noticed a certain weakness in his
legs despite his ominous height, but he hastened to compose
himself and to stand up straight. Just then, the woman knitting
turned to smile. Their eyes met in an instant that carried a
foreboding message. He understood its meaning the moment the
door reopened. “The master of the house will receive you in the
library.”
The Franciscan was led through a long corridor filled with
family portraits; all of the likenesses bore an astonishing
resemblance. It seemed that the features only changed a bit to
reappear fully again in the next generation. An unquenchable
thirst for power was evident in every posture. The pride these
relatives expressed became only more prominent as he came face
to face with the living descendant of that line. “It has been
our tradition to offer hospitality and safety to or guests for
centuries,” Zoti Tilli said, indicating a seat for the friar.
“I have come to pay homage to the family that founded and
protected this village since the times of the great crossing and
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 721
to render the services of the house of the Lord whenever
needed.”
“Come, come, friar. I know exactly why you came and why you
were sent to this village. The house of the Paternosters has
shed the blood of many of its members to preserve the sanctity
of this town and its people. We fought Turks and Slavs alike to
find a corridor that would lead our people to safety and would
preserve our way of life. Time, the enemy of memories, has
forced the townspeople to forget our sacrifice and the right we
have to these lands.”
“People are being killed and the Church cannot look the other
way,” asserted the friar, mustering every bit of courage he
could find. “Besides, the people are unhappy and they work your
lands in fear. A bad harvest can fill your belly but starve
theirs. Families have been torn apart when fathers have been
forced to leave for distant lands in order to sustain their
children. Certainly there has to be a way to share the wealth
that surrounds this community to the benefit of all. Times have
changed, and the young who have traveled and seen other places
are restless.”
“Before our family succumbs to the demands to parcel out the
land as these educated young foreigners see fit to preach, we
will burn it and render it useless. You have heard my words,
friar. Our meeting is over, but before you leave, I would advise
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 722
you to devote your time to saving souls and not to mingle in
politics. It is a dangerous enterprise.”
The friar, his mouth as dry as if he had a high fever, barely
managed to lift himself from the upholstered chair. He realized
that his presence in Sheshi was not going to bring any changes.
He felt a strange need to cry, just as he often did when in the
convent. That August afternoon, as the door closed behind him,
he knew that the piteous smile of the woman crocheting spelled
defeat for his visit and resignation for the townspeople. The
house of the Paternosters was never to open again for the
Franciscan friar. That same night, he dreamt of a sky full of
white doves. The brilliant whiteness of the sky quickly turned
into a shiny darkness followed by a thick gray and white
downpour of bird droppings which filled the streets of Sheshi.
It was to be his last dream. The few old ladies who saw him fall
down the next day in front of the altar as he raised the host,
the body of Christ, swore that they heard a piercing whistle
that tore through the nave of the church to the altar. “We saw
the friar melt into the blood of Christ as the red liquid flowed
out of his eyes, evaporating his body.”
The village took the news in stride. “They sent him as a lamb
to be slaughtered by the Paternosters,” whispered Viti to the
old-timers seated on the wooden bench facing the fountain. Viti
knew everyone in the village by the sound of their shoes.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 723
Thereupon, Sheshi fell into a deep silence which lasted for
years, until one day, one by one, the families began to return
to tilling the fields as sharecroppers, convinced that their
fate was the will of God. Soon after, the first signs of
malnutrition began to appear in the bellies and the eyes of the
children. Viti relived the conversation he had had with his son
the day Dunati had learned of his mother’s suicide. “Your mother
was in great pain seeing your sisters go to bed hungry. But what
was more painful to her still were the terrible days she saw
ahead. There was nothing I could do to dissuade her. I was
forced to send your oldest sister to your Uncle Ndoni in those
distant lands where your breath freezes in the winter so that
she could help sustain the family. It was not an easy thing to
do. She was still young with her eyes half opened to the world,
but I had no other choice. The others were still holding on to
one another and you had just been born.”
Young Dunati had his heart set upon being the best barber in
the village. It did not take long for his reputation to spread
and soon after his skill was renowned even in the towns at the
extreme end of the mountains whose lights could be seen at night
from the hill of the train station. It was said that the gentle
touch of this new barber could return youth and beauty to
everyone. One day, even his father Viti came to the shop to have
his hair cut. Dunati had seen him waiting across the street for
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 724
the shop to empty of patrons. For his part, the father noted the
long lines of suffering engraved in his son’s face, together
with that unvarnished pride he had observed in the newborn the
day he first opened his eyes. The years were also beginning to
find their way into Viti’s bones, for his strong shoulders had
begun to droop, if only slightly,
“I have been hearing from everyone in Sheshi about your skill
in cutting hair,” Viti said as he sat down. His son’s reflection
in the mirror was that of his grandfather. It was the line that
never broke in the village. Some would be born and die there;
others departed for faraway places, only to return with their
faces unchanged. If time moved on, it did so like the days in a
year, completing one cycle and starting another. That was the
last time that Viti walked from the house to the barber shop. A
strange but persistent melancholy was to take hold of him in a
month’s time. One morning Viti lowered his head, never to hold
it up again. If Viti did go out, it would only be at dusk. Just
as everyone else in the village, Viti believed that the hours
after dusk belonged to the departed souls. He was certain that
it was only a matter of time before he would come face to face
with the soul of his wife Rusina. The weight of her lifeless
body and the unequivocal smell of death which he sensed when he
gently lowered her after undoing the single knot in the rope by
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 725
which she was suspended, remained with Viti until their souls
fused into one on a late summer evening.
That night, the moon had appeared on the opposite side of the
sun, setting as red as a Sicilian orange. The few men returning
from the fields first saw Viti walking above the ground with the
grace of those angels that descend from the starry sky of the
Chapel of the Virgin of Constantinople on Christmas Eve to
announce the birth of the Saviour. But, as they turned from the
road towards the main square, they noticed a swarm swirling
toward the top of the mountain. The whiteness of the ascending
butterflies left behind a cloud of snow that never reached the
ground. It forced everyone in Sheshi to open their doors, only
to be blinded by the intensity of the light. Those who were
caught in the streets remained blind until the next full moon,
when, one by one they washed their eyes in the waters of the
sacred cave. Soon after, the fig tree began to wither. It had
been a landmark for strangers approaching the village from the
eastern side of the seven mountains. Its enormous branches and
wide trunk, which it took nine people, arms linked, to embrace,
erased Sheshi from the minds of those wanderers who had seen it
and placed its account in their distant memories.
The townspeople began to feel their isolation more quickly than
one might think. The road in and out of the village vanished.
The elders could no longer talk to their dead in the midnight
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 726
hour. No one remembered where the train station had been when
the young came of age. The flowers on the icon of the Virgin of
Constantinople turned to ashes and the three-arched bridge was
washed away by a roaring mudslide which crashed down from the
widest cleft of the seven mountains. The flow of mud carried the
village to the very edge of the cliff overlooking the silent
brook. Big fires were lit in the late evening to attract the
attention of the Albanian villages in the distance. Letters
asking for help were sent to those who had left the village for
other lands; the elders provided the names and physical
descriptions of those who had gone. For quick recognition and to
assist in their return to the village, the envelopes were
scented with dry oregano leaves that only grew on the slopes of
the seven hills. For days the townsfolk had pondered exactly how
to send those letters, until they decided to trap the migrant
birds with wings the color of a hundred rainbows and beaks like
ancient scimitars. On their flight from the sandy seas, the
birds stopped along the hidden brook to quench their thirst. The
trees that lined the flow of water were filled with nets woven
from the filaments of palm trees.
Spring came and the village fell into a deep silence so as not
to disturb the resting birds. In a week’s time, the villagers
caught thousands of them. To each they tied an envelope and then
sent it on its journey. Then the wait for their return began.
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 727
The wait became weeks and the weeks, months. Years went by and
the urge to communicate their location to the outsiders began to
wane. There were only a few townspeople left who managed to keep
their memories alive by inducing dreams with the help of the
black mushrooms that grew inside the trunks of dead chestnut
trees.
How many years passed, no one could tell. But one person did
find the road back to the train station. He was an ageless being
who was led there by a flock of blackbirds searching for the
sweet meat of the crabs that lived in the silent brook. The
stooped old man followed the trail for months, eating as little
as possible of the dried figs he carried and chewing the heart
of the poppy flowers to erase the shadows of forgetfulness from
his eyes. One early morning, between the hour of darkness and
the hour of light, he heard a familiar noise that swept him
right back to the memories from his childhood. After careful
consideration, he was certain that he had reached the train
station of long ago. The village below seemed as far away as the
clouds that danced on top of the chain of mountains with the
open music of the sky. The man went round and round the station,
recognizing every polished stone and every withered flower.
Tears ran down his cheeks as he fixed his eyes on the chestnut
trees on top of the hill and the enduring blackberry shrubs
along the embankment. He even recalled the spring behind them,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 728
its waters the coolest in the region. He made a decision: “I
shall wait here until someone brings back one of the letters.”
He chose to sit on the east side of the station so that he might
see the train emerging from the tunnel and protect himself from
the cold night winds. Never failing to descend from the
mountains, these winds were the music that made the serpent in
the sacred cave draw rings of foam on the water. There was no
other music like it, and whoever tried to record it would grow
deaf upon replaying it.
How long old Tunini waited for the train to bring back the
letters was never told. Years must have gone by, however, for
where the tall chestnut trees once stood, the earth had dried to
become almost a desert. It was like a deep wound that never
healed but only grew as wide as the parched tentacles that
descended from the seven mountains. Old Tunini had gotten used
to closing his eyes at sunset and opening them at the first
sound of the lizards that lived in the cracks of the station
walls. He recalled how the trains had taken so many people away
but only brought back a few. There had been a period during
which the trains had not stopped as they carried the young men
in their black uniforms from all around the mountains. “I
remember waving to them from the end of the platform, knowing
that most would never return.” Old Tunini still recalled the
faint smiles on their innocent faces as they looked out of the
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 729
carriage windows. The trains merely slowed down but never
stopped. Years afterwards, a long black train filled with little
tri-colored flags did stop to unload wooden boxes, all of the
same size. They piled them inside the waiting room. “At night I
could smell the ashes still warm from the slowly burning embers.
If all that glory ends up smelling like ashes, it would be best
to do away with it, I said to myself.”
Old Tunini could not tell one from the other. The boxes were
all piled up together like the mounds of volcanic ash that
people picked up at the bottom of the ravine and placed over the
roots of the olive trees. Not long after, tall buildings began
to go up where the chestnut woods had once stood. People used to
go there to sit under the cool shade and slice their red
watermelons cooled by the water of the nearby brook. Each family
claimed a bit of the shade and, while the adults reminisced, the
young ones would stand guard, trying to catch the small birds
that flew by in circles.
“But now the barren land allowed the wind to rush down with
frightening speed. The brook dried out and the water disappeared
underground. The worst were the dust storms, which came
unexpectedly, especially when the sun was as hot as the oven
that baked the bread for the entire village. The station
disappeared in the haze for days and I had to search for my
breath through the pockets of air trapped in the handkerchief. I
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 730
have to confess that, at times, I felt lonely. During those
moments, I felt a strong urge to go down to the village square.
Yet, the fear of not finding my way back quickly changed my
mind. The grass was growing as tall as the first floor windows
of the train station, and my eyes were growing blurry. I did not
know how long I would last, but I made a vow to myself and to
all those who were forced to leave Sheshi for one reason or
another that I would be waiting for the train to bring back the
letters before I closed my eyes forever.”
With that pledge in mind Old Tunini slept for days, unaware of
anything that went on around him. And the days went by like
butterflies, taking a bit of the sunset with them, as the
flowers patiently awaited the rising of the sun and the
fluttering of the wings circling and diving into their hearts.
As he slept, Old Tunini returned to the morning mist rising from
the ravine and sending the fading lights of the village into the
sky of years ago.
“The mules were laden with water and hay on each side of their
saddles. I could count each of them in my mind as they cropped
the stubble close by. I rushed to tie the laces of my heavy
shoes before father left for the field. Father always carried
with him a bit of sleep and a hidden fear of encountering the
souls of those who had not made it back home in time to die in
their own beds. I pressed my legs tightly against the saddle,
“Little Did They Know” Vincenzo Bollettino 731
counting Father’s footsteps so as to know when to slow the mule
down to avoid picking up rocks. Later on, Mother would join us,
bringing the midday meal with the hard bre