"I'm not hungry," she said finally. "I think I'll go—"
"No, Meli," Baba said quietly. "Don't leave us. We have to hold on to each other."
Suddenly, she was back in Kosovo during those terrible times. Yes, they must hold on to each other. War, like a tiger prowling in the shadows, had followed their scent, and now it had them in its sight and was ready to pounce. Their only protection was to stay together. Mehmet had to understand that. How could she make him understand?
She knew he couldn't carry out his threat to return to Kosovo. Even at sixteen he was still a boy. He didn't have money for airfare, or any idea of how to get the proper papers. But his fury frightened her all the same. He had been so much better lately; sometimes he was nearly the old Mehmet, the one she had known before the day he'd disappeared, the day of the pelican. Now it felt as though she had lost her brother all over again. Don't you see, Mehmet? It's like Baba always said. We have to hold on to each other!
Did those bullies know the damage they had done to someone who was just beginning to heal? Did they care? It was bad enough to feel alone, as Meli did, deserted by the only person she had dared to think of as a friend, but to have such hatred? And yet, and yet, she herself had tasted that corrosive poison. That very afternoon, looking into Brittany's face, she had seen the hated Serbs. Baba was right. Hate made no sense. They must not let it eat away at their souls. They would become like the very ones they hated. She wanted to bang on Mehmet's door and scream at him, Don't let them do this to you! Don't do it to yourself! But she just sat there, staring at her plate.
After she and Mama had washed the dishes, she went to her room and tried to do her homework. Baba had said they must go back to school. But how could she unless Mehmet went as well? Even though she rarely saw him at school, she had to know that he was there—that they were holding together against those who despised them.
She dimly heard the telephone ring in the kitchen and didn't think to wonder who might be calling. But before long Baba knocked on her half-open door. "Meli, are you dressed?"
"Yes, Baba." She whispered so as not to wake Vlora, who was sleeping peacefully in the other bed.
"Wash your face and comb your hair. We have visitors coming."
Visitors? At nine o'clock at night?
Then she heard Baba at Mehmet's door. She didn't want to listen to them argue. She couldn't bear it. She went quickly to the bathroom and washed her face. She patted down her hair and then went into the kitchen, where Mama was busy making coffee. She had changed into her nicest dress.
"Mama?"
"Take some chairs from the kitchen into the parlor, Meli. We need more chairs in there."
As she was bringing in a second chair, Baba and Mehmet emerged from the boys' room. "Help your sister, Mehmet," Baba said.
Mehmet brought in a chair and sat down on it, his body as stiff as a pole. Meli and Mama sat on the others. She waited for some explanation from Baba, but none came. At length they could hear footsteps on the stairs. It sounded like a number of people. Police! They are going to arrest us for being Muslim. No, that was crazy. Police didn't call ahead to say they were coming. And Mama wouldn't be dressed up and making coffee if she thought they were all going to be hauled off to jail. It was a ridiculous fear. Still, it was a few seconds before her heart stopped racing. Just some of the welcomers, surely. But why would they come so late at night?
At the knock, Baba nodded at Meli, so she got up and opened the door. The first person she saw in the dark hallway was Mrs. Rogers; just behind her was Mr. Marcello, and with him Adona. Why was Adona here? They hadn't needed a translator for months. Mehmet or she or one of the other children had done all the translating for their parents. The three visitors were in the process of taking off their shoes. Adona must have told the others to. Americans didn't seem to know how important it was.
"Let the guests in, Meli," Baba said. He and Mama stood up.
When Mehmet saw his coach, he started for his bedroom, but Baba grabbed his arm.
"How are you, Meli?" Mrs. Rogers asked.
Meli tried to smile back, but her face felt frozen.
Adona stepped forward and said to Baba in Albanian, "These are the children's coaches for playing soccer." She introduced Mrs. Rogers and Mr. Marcello to Mama and Baba. The adults shook hands formally. Then Baba indicated that everyone, including Mehmet, was to take a seat. The three guests sat down on the couch.
"I have made coffee," Mama said shyly to Adona. "Shall I bring it out? We don't have any cola or mineral water, but..."
Adona shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "It's late. They won't stay long."
Mr. Marcello was sitting on the edge of the couch cushion. He had taken off his baseball cap and was playing with it. The light from the ceiling fixture seemed to bounce off his bald scalp. Finally, without looking at Baba, he spoke to Adona.
"Tell Mr. Lleshi," the coach said, "that I've come to apologize for what happened to his son today."
Adona translated. Mehmet sat like a stone on the kitchen chair, his lips tight, a bruise on his face dark against his red cheek. Meli could still see the dried blood in his nostrils.
"Tell him," the coach continued, "that it will never happen again. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior. Tomorrow those boys are off the team. For good." As Adona translated, Meli saw that Mr. Marcello had a hole in one of his socks. She could see his big toe sticking out like a tiny bald head. Poor man, she thought. How hard this must be for him. She glanced at Mehmet to see if he felt any pity for his coach. If he did, there was no sign of it.
"And you should tell Mr. and Mrs. Lleshi that I totally agree with Coach Marcello," Mrs. Rogers said. "I am cutting every girl who took part in that scene in the locker room today."
But that would be the whole team! Meli thought, and then wondered how her coach had found out what had happened. Someone must have been ashamed and told her. Meli hoped it had been Rachel.
"I should have been there. I'm usually just next door in my office, but I had been called to the main office, so I wasn't there when it happened. Otherwise ... I cannot tell you how sorry I am."
Baba listened, his head bent toward the translator to make sure he understood every word. When Adona finished, he looked up at the coaches. "Sank you," he said. Then he turned back to Adona. "Tell the kind teachers that it would not be a good thing to remove those boys and girls from their teams. They will only become bitter and hate my children all the more. Tell the teachers that my children are strong. They have endured many hard things in their short lives. They can also endure this." He waited for Adona to say the words in English; when she paused, he continued. "Tell them my children wish to be respected as fellow teammates and not despised because of their heritage. That is the way of the old country. This is America, tell them. In America, everyone has a new beginning."
When Adona finished translating, Mrs. Rogers smiled, first at Baba and then at Meli. "And what about you, Meli?" she asked softly. "Do you agree? Should I let everyone stay on the team?"
"Yes, like Baba said."
"Even Brittany?"
"You can't have a team without a goalkeeper."
Coach Marcello turned and spoke directly to Mehmet. "What about you, Mehmet? How do you feel about this?"
Mehmet didn't answer. He sat very still, his eyes on the floor.
"Tell the teacher," Baba said, speaking to Adona but looking all the while at Mehmet, "tell the teacher that my son has endured much more painful hardship than this. As a child, he was once in a Serbian jail, where he was beaten and left in a field to die." As Adona translated, Meli saw Mr. Marcello's eyes widen. Mrs. Rogers gasped. "He is very brave, my son," Baba continued, "and I am very proud of him. He will do the right thing. You will see."
Now Mehmet looked up at Baba, and for a moment Meli imagined she saw tears in her brother's eyes. He did not wait for Adona to finish her translation before he said quietly, "Baba is right. One man does not make a team. We must play together, or
there is no game."
Coach Marcello's hands stopped fiddling with his cap. He cleared his throat. "Thank you, Mehmet," he said. Then, very quietly, so that Meli did not hear it until it was repeated in her own language: "He says to tell you, Mr. Lleshi, that you are a good man, and he hopes that he will be as good a father to his children as you are to yours."
"Tell the kind teachers," Baba answered, "that Mehmet and Meli will be back for practice tomorrow."
***
The next morning Meli found Rachel waiting at her locker. "Don't hate me," she blurted out. "I was scared. That's no excuse, I know, but—"
"You told Mrs. Rogers, didn't you?"
"Yes, but..."
"That was brave, Rachel."
"I should never have let Brittany bully me. I hate myself, so I know you must hate me."
She looked so miserable that Meli reached out and touched her arm. "I could never hate you, Rachel. You're the one person who has always been kind to me."
"Until yesterday. Yesterday..."
"My baba says hate makes no sense. He's right. I want to forget about yesterday, okay?"
"Really?"
"Really."
It would be a long time before she and Rachel would eat a sack of salt together, but this was a beginning, wasn't it?
***
Although it wasn't the end of stares in the hallways and whispers in the cafeteria, things were different at school after that. Perhaps it was because Mehmet was different. He was still the best player, but now he was less arrogant, more sharing. Even the boys who had attacked him were forced to respect him.
Meli still worried about her brother. She wanted the last trace of his bitterness to dissolve. She wanted him to slap the other boys on their backsides and tell stupid jokes, which, knowing Mehmet, was most unlikely to happen. But he was trying to make Baba proud of him; that was clear. On Sunday afternoons he began to coach a soccer team for Isuf and Adil and their many little friends, and when Mehmet talked with the younger boys, she could see something of Baba's gentleness growing in him. Every now and then he spoke of returning home, but only when Kosovo was recognized as a nation, not so long as NATO insisted it was still simply a region of Serbia. "Only when we are a free country," he said.
One day, to her own surprise, she realized that she was no longer thinking of going back home to Kosovo. Not because she thought America was a perfect country. If it were a perfect country, Baba would have a good job by now, and Mama wouldn't have to clean motel rooms. Being Muslim or Christian or Jewish or nothing at all wouldn't matter, and the president wouldn't be talking about going to war in yet another Muslim land. Perhaps, though, there were no perfect countries. America was their new beginning, as Baba said, and she was beginning to like the person she was becoming. She had a real friend now. Rachel was not Zana, but she was Rachel, and Meli liked and trusted her.
Of course, some days she thought of Kosovo and felt a wave of homesickness for the things and people she had loved there. She longed for Granny and her funny old ways. She wished she could put flowers on Granny's grave and have coffee with Uncle Fadil and Auntie Burbuqe and Nexima. The twins were talking now. She wanted to talk to them before she forgot all her Albanian, which she knew was getting all mixed up with English words and no longer pure.
She wished she could know where Zana was. Meli had written more letters. None had been answered. She had asked Uncle Fadil, but the new family living in Zana's house had no idea what had happened to the previous owners. Meli dreamed one night that she was walking along the street in a strange American city, and coming toward her on the sidewalk was Zana, looking just as she had the last time Meli had seen her, when they were both eleven years old and misbehaving in Mr. Uka's school. She felt homesick all the next day.
But the homesickness passed. The family had held together. America was home now.
* * *
Historical Note
The history of Kosovo is a long and tangled one, and, as in all historical accounts, everything depends on who is telling the story. Kosovars like to recall their great hero Gjergi Kastrioti, better known as Skanderbeg. Skanderbeg was a fifteenth-century prince who fought the invasion of the Ottoman Turks. After his death, the Ottomans prevailed and completely occupied Albanian lands for 425 years. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when "Turkey in Europe," as the Balkan portion of the Ottoman Empire was sometimes known, began to break up, there was no way to go back to the national boundaries of pre-Ottoman days. Much of the territory had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the empire was defeated in World War I, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed from the southern Slav territories. Its name was changed in 1929 to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which literally means "South Slav," and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was formed after World War II under the former freedom fighter known as Marshall Tito. In 1963 the country was once again renamed, this time as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or SFRY, and it was made up of six Socialist Republics, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Slovenia, and SR Serbia, which included the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Metohija (later included as part of Kosovo). Although there were Serbs and other minorities living in Kosovo, under Tito Kosovo's leaders were, by and large, Albanian Kosovars, as they made up the majority of the population.
When Tito died in 1980, there was a struggle for the control in Yugoslavia. In the Republic of Serbia, Slobodan Milosević began to take power, and in 1989 he was able to change the constitution in such a way as to reduce the autonomy of Kosovo and put Serbs in charge. Many Albanians lost their jobs and found their activities restricted.
In 1990 Albanian Kosovars proclaimed the Republic of Kosovo, and in unsanctioned elections chose as president a literary scholar and pacifist, Ibrahim Rugova, who created a shadow government that had no actual power. When Bosnia proclaimed its independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1991, a bloody war ensued, in which the better-armed Bosnian Serbs carried out a policy of "ethnic cleansing" designed to eliminate the Muslim population of Bosnia. NATO intervened on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims and brokered a settlement. Eventually, Europe and the United States recognized Bosnia—as well as Slovenia and Croatia, whose declarations of independence had preceded Bosnia's—as an independent nation, but not Kosovo, which was to remain a province of FRY, which by 1992 consisted only of Serbia and Montenegro.
In the early nineties, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) grew out of small groups of nationalistic guerrillas making occasional attacks against Serbian authorities in Kosovo. The Serbs reacted by further acts of repression against Albanian citizens, exemplified by the massacre of the Jashari family in March 1998.
Although the U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright declared on March 7, "We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia," American and European governments did little more than talk and threaten while Serbian atrocities continued. There were counterattacks from the growing KLA resistance, and those were met with more violence from the Serbian police as well as soldiers from Milosević's FRY army. Attempts to negotiate a settlement with President Milosević failed repeatedly, and a NATO bombing campaign, hitting targets in both Kosovo and Serbia proper, commenced in March 1999. FRY military and Serb paramilitary troops then began an attempt to clear Kosovo of all its Albanian citizens, who up until then had made up about 90 percent of the population. During this terrible process of so-called ethnic cleansing, many Albanians were massacred and many Albanian women were raped. Homes and farms were routinely looted and then burned to prevent their Albanian owners from ever returning.
In June 1999 NATO reached an agreement with FRY regarding a withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo, and Albanian Kosovars began to return from the refugee camps to which they had fled or been driven. Tragically, there were many acts of revenge committed against the remaining Serb p
opulation, causing a northward flight of Serbs from Kosovo to Serbia. President Milosević was indicted for war crimes in 1999 but was not brought to trial until 2002; he died in prison in 2006 before a verdict was reached.
As part of the June 1999 settlement, a NATO force known as KFOR entered Kosovo to preserve order and provide aid in the devastated country; as of spring 2009 it still maintained a presence in Kosovo. On February 17, 2008, the Assembly of Kosovo's Provisional Institutions of Self-Government declared the Republic of Kosova an independent nation. The Albanian Kosovar double-headed eagle flag was disallowed by the UN, so Kosova's current flag shows a map of the country with six stars—each star representing one of Kosova's major ethnic groups. This is significant, for the new constitution promises to protect the rights of minorities (including Serbs) and provide guaranteed ethnic representation in the government. The Republic of Kosova—or as the UN still calls it, Kosovo—has been recognized by more than forty nations, including the United States, but, at this writing, more than twenty nations, including Serbia and Russia, still refuse recognition.
The Lleshis' story ends in America, but the story of their native land is still being written. We can only hope that those who have survived so much terror and devastation will be able to build a strong and peaceful nation.
* * *
Acknowledgments
This book came out of my acquaintance with the Haxhiu family, who came to Vermont in 1999 under the sponsorship of the First Presbyterian Church of Barre. Among the many actual "welcomers" who did much to help the Haxhius feel at home in this country our pastors, Carl and Gina Hilton-Van Osdall, and Steve and Wendy Dale, deserve particular mention. It was Steve who gave me the idea to write about one Kosovar family's experience, which I did initially in a newspaper breakfast serial titled Long Road Home. The person who has made the writing of this book possible is Mark Orfila, who lived for a number of years in Kosovo, both before and after the terrible events of 1998-99.^ and his wife also worked in a Macedonian refugee camp. I cannot thank Mark enough for all his help. And, finally, I must once again thank my chief supporters: my editor, Virginia Buckley, and my husband, John Paterson.