“What would happen, Rexh, if you ate pork without knowing it?” said I.
“Nothing, Mrs. Lane. Nothing would happen even if I ate it, knowing I was doing it. But for me it is wrong to eat pork, so I would never do that. For these others,” he explained, carefully, looking very serious and very twelve-year-old, “it is not wrong to eat pork. It is not the pork itself that matters, Mrs. Lane. It is doing what is wrong that matters. See”—he sat up, making his points gravely with straight forefinger—“some things are wrong for the Catholics to do; they are right for me. I can have nine wives, but the Catholics can have only one. They can eat pork, but that is wrong for me. There are many things like that. Each must do what he thinks is right. It does not matter what it is. Men think differently. But God knows whether they do what seems right to them. And in the end we all go to the same heaven, if we have been good.”
“Goodness, Rexh!” I murmured, feebly. I ask you, is that the talk you would expect between Mohammedan and Catholic in the Near East? What about massacres, and holy wars, and all that?
“What about them?” said Perolli, when I asked him. “They may be in Asia Minor—though, myself, I think religion hasn’t much to do with the fighting between Christian and Turk. But we don’t have them in Albania. We are all Albanians, first. And second, the Virgin Mary is the mother of all good people, Mohammedan or Catholic. Why should we fight each other?”
And he told of Italy’s attempt to block Albania’s entry into the League of Nations by asserting that the people were Mohammedan, and of the Albanian Mohammedans’ quiet retort in sending to Geneva a delegation led by an archbishop followed by I forget how many bishops. Then he told about the people in Kossova, who are both Catholic and Mohammedan, going to the mosque by day and attending mass by night; that is because they were conquered by the Turks, who told them they must become followers of Mohammed. “Very well,” they said, since it made little difference to them. But then the priests told them that they must not forsake the Church. “Very well,” they said again. And they are called in Albania a word which means, “half-and-half.”
“All that is not important,” said Perolli, his attention wandering, for the group around the fire began to talk Albanian politics. Behind his casually cheerful brown eyes I saw many things stirring, and I lay back, staring up at the smoke beneath the roof and wondering what was in all the hidden minds around me. Did our hosts suspect that Perolli was part of the new, distrusted Tirana government? Why, really, was he in these mountains? Was it truly only a vacation, and was he taking his life in his hands and wandering along the edge of the Serbian armies’ lines merely for pleasure? What were the real thoughts of these barbaric-looking men, these men with shaved heads and scalp locks hidden beneath their turbans, as question and answer and argument went back and forth across the fire?
They were talking in perhaps six languages; not everyone there understood all those tongues, and subtle conversations beneath conversations were going on; this man dropping into Italian for a phrase, that one into a dialect of Samarkand or northern India. And there was one man who persistently talked Serbian to Perolli—that language, at least, I could recognize, and I could see him growing restive under it, trying to take the talk into Albanian instead.
The children who were still awake sat soberly listening, not speaking, but gathering it all into their minds, turning their eyes from speaker to speaker as the languages changed, puzzled a little, trying to understand. And I realized how Albanian children get their education.
“We’d be saying: ‘Run away and play, dear. This isn’t for children,’” I commented.
“We wouldn’t,” said Frances. “They’d have been in bed six hours ago. How on earth do they live to grow up?”