“When my father was sixty-five years old, strong and healthy, one day the ora did not come. She did not come the next day, nor the next, nor the next, for many days. Then my father knew that she would not come again and that it was his time to die. So he arranged all his affairs and died. Just before he died he told us about the ora; he told us so that we would know why he was making ready for death, and it was because his ora had left him.”
CHAPTER V
THE UNEARTHLY MARRIAGE OF THE MAN OF IPEK—FIRST NIGHT IN A NATIVE ALBANIAN HOUSE.
There was a moment of contemplative silence. Beyond the circle of firelight the goats still tore and worried the dried leaves from the oak branches. A woman came leisurely forward and put an iron pan on the coals. When it was hot she brought scraps of pork and laid them in it. Rexh, the little Mohammedan, turned his head so that he should not smell that unclean meat. Frances said to Perolli, in a ravenous voice, “How much longer will it be before we can eat?”
He looked at her reprovingly. “In Albania it is not polite to care about food.”
“But it’s past midnight and we’ve had nothing to eat since noon!” Frances mourned.
“Slowly, slowly, little by little,” said Perolli, soothingly. For myself, I curled more comfortably among the blankets, too contented to ask for anything at all. It was as though I had returned to a place that I knew long ago and found myself at home there. I had forgotten that these people are living still in the childhood of the Aryan race and that I am the daughter of a century that is, to them, in the far and unknown future. Twenty-five centuries had vanished, for me, as though they had never been.
“That lady ora was no doubt betrothed to one of her own people,” said a man who had not previously spoken. “Now in my lost country of Ipek—may the Serbs who are murdering her feel our teeth in their throats!—I know a man who was married to an ora.”
A woman, barefooted, wearing a skirt of heavy black and white wool, a wide, silver-studded leather belt and a blouse of sheer white, her two thick black braids of hair falling from beneath a crimson headkerchief almost to her knees, came out of the shadows beyond the fire and lowered from her shoulder a beautifully shaped wooden jar of water. She held it braced against her hip, and, stooping, poured a thin stream over our outstretched hands. We laved them, the water sinking into the ashes around the fire, and another woman handed us each a towel of hand-woven red-and-white-plaided linen. Then we sat expectantly, but only a wooden bowl of cheese was set on the floor before us.
It was goat’s-milk cheese, rather like the cottage cheese of home, except that it was hard, cut in cubes, and of an acrid, sourish flavor. We each took a piece, nibbled it.