Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

At midnight Perolli and Padre Marjan retired to the cold, wet living room, to roll themselves in blankets and sleep on the floor. We three girls sat shivering on the mattress and wished we knew what the chiefs were deciding.

But, oh! it was good to take off the clothes, so many times soaked with rain, in which we had walked and climbed and slept for three days and nights. And forks may be idle luxuries, but there is no question that a thin mattress filled with straw and laid on raised boards is one of the greatest comforts in life!

We were awakened in the damp chill of a watery gray dawn, and with surprise found ourselves on its unfamiliar softness, in the bleak room of unpainted boards. Padre Marjan was knocking at the door. In a moment he entered, barefooted, in his long brown robe girded with cord, and, going to the incongruous office desk, he carefully unlocked a lower drawer and took out a box of soap. There were twenty small cakes of soap in the box. He took out one, carefully, put the box back in the drawer, locked it.

He had been followed by a small boy, a very serious child, and visibly nervous. About eleven years old, he wore the long, tight, black-braided white trousers, colored sash, and woolly, fringed short black jacket of his people, but they were all soaking wet and very old, mended and mended again until hardly any of the original fabric was left. His bare feet were blue with cold, and so were his bare arms, for the Scanderbeg jacket has no sleeves, and he did not wear a shirt. He stood very straight, and swallowed hard, keeping his face impassive.

Padre Marjan turned to him, holding the cake of soap. He spoke earnestly and at some little length. He then presented the cake of soap to the child, who bent a knee to receive it, and kissed the padre’s hand and then the soap. An impressive little ceremonial, which we witnessed, wide eyed, from the mattress where we sat huddled among the blankets. Rain was still sluicing against the windows, so that the water on them was surely as thick as the glass.

We looked inquiringly at Frances, who understood Albanian. Her eyes shone, she was so excited. “It’s a school prize!” she said, and, listening, “He’s the best scholar in school; already he can read and write. Isn’t it splendid!” The boy saluted us gravely; one saw that he had just gone through a profound emotional experience. “Long may you live!” said he, and went out.

Padre Marjan said that the school had been opened ten days before. On the first day there were forty-three pupils, on the second day sixty-two, on the third day ninety-seven. All the tribe was sending its children to live with relatives in Thethis and go to school. No more than ninety-seven could get into the padre’s living room; the others must wait until, with the money Alex and Frances had collected, the schoolhouse could be built. There were no benches or desks, of course; the children stood packed tightly in the cold room, and he taught them by writing with a piece of chalk on the walls. Already this boy could read and write words of one syllable and merited a cake of soap. Padre Marjan, at his own expense, had sent two hundred miles to Tirana for fifty cakes of soap, to be used as prizes. There was, of course, no other soap in the tribe; a more magnificent gift could not have been imagined.

The boy who got the cake of soap walked every morning nine miles over the mountains to reach school at seven o’clock, and at nine, after school, he walked back and took out the goats and spent all day climbing trees and cutting twigs for them to eat.

Padre Marjan said that as soon as he knew the Americans would build the school he had started teaching, and he had written to the government in Tirana and asked if it would help. He brought from the desk the letter he had received in reply. Written by hand, for the poverty-stricken young government had no typewriters, and sent by messenger into the mountains, in six weeks it had reached Thethis, and the padre kept it wrapped in a bit of hand-woven silk. Frances spelled it out; it said that the government would give a hundred kronen a month to pay the teacher. It was signed for the Minister of the Interior by Rrok Perolli.

“My sainted grandmother!” cried Frances. “Where is Perolli?” At that very minute the chiefs might be sending word to the Serbs to come and get him. The chiefs themselves would surely not violate the hospitality of their priest, but the Serbs would have no reverence for it and they were only a few miles away. When we thought what a bargain the chiefs might drive with the Serbs for Perolli it seemed too much to hope that one of them, at least, would not hand him over.