“Do you think, Perolli,” said Frances, “that we could go to bed now?” And she looked enviously at Alex, who sat stony eyed, upright, and fast asleep.
“Oh, surely!” said Perolli. “They’ll understand that you’re tired.” And he explained this to our hosts, who nodded, smiling. So Cheremi and Rexh spread our blankets more smoothly on the floor, and we lay down in a row, our heads on our saddlebags, and pulled another blanket over us.
For a time the others sat by the fire and talked; one roasted coffee over the coals in a long-handled pan, and then ground it in a cylinder of brass. The warm brown smell of it and the sound of grinding kept coming through my daze of fatigue. Then one by one they lay down, covering their heads with blankets; the fire died to a fading glow of coals; there was no sound except the incessant tinkling of the goats’ bells and the crunching and tearing of the dried oak branches which they munched.
“My first night in a native Albanian house,” I thought, and the next instant, it seemed to me, I started awake. The room was full of movement and talk. It was still dark, but in the farther corner a gray, slanting block of light came through the open door; smoke curled and twisted in it. The fire was blazing; near it a man knelt, making coffee. All around him men stood, twisting tighter their long colored sashes; the rifles on their backs stood upward at every angle. Then I saw the goats and sheep going one by one through the block of gray light; a boy followed them, rifle on back and staff in hand, and I realized that it was morning.
I looked at my wrist watch, whose radium dial shone in the darkness. Half past five. The man who was making coffee smiled at me. “Long may you live!” said he, warmly, offering me the tiny cup with one hand, the other on his heart. As in a nightmare I struggled to reach it, and made my stiff lips say, “And to you long life!”
Perolli sat up quickly, wide awake as an aroused animal. “Good morning!” said he, happily. “Time to get up!”
Rain was still sluicing down from a gray sky; every rock in the interminable ranges of mountain peaks seemed to be the source of a foaming stream. Frances, Alex, and I, with our toilet cases in our hands, made our way along the side of a cliff to a waterfall, knelt on the dripping rocks beside it, and washed and brushed our teeth. The woman who accompanied us watched us with interest, and exclaimed, while we showed her the tooth-paste tubes, the tooth brushes in their cases, the cakes of soap, the jars of cold cream, the strange machine-made Turkish toweling, and the white combs. Even to ourselves they seemed exotic luxuries. How many curious things we have invented for the care of our bodies, since the days when we lived as the mountain Albanians still live.
“And at that,” I said, enviously, “I wish I had her complexion!” The woman stood by the waterfall, as graceful as a cat, strong limbed, clear eyed, fine skinned, and her bare feet in the cold water were joys to the eye, slim, beautifully formed, arched, with almond nails and a rose-marble color. True, her face and hands were grimy with wood smoke, and ours, when we looked at one another, set us off into exhausting laughter.
“My house is clean,” said the woman as she watched us scrubbing and scrubbing again. “There are no lice in it.”
“Now I wonder where she got that idea?” said Alex. “I thought they thought lice were healthy.”