“We have another system of owning property in America,” said I. “By that system, often men cannot afford to marry until they are quite old. They are never able to marry as young as you do here. In fact, many persons never marry at all.”
“Because there are not enough women?”
“Oh no! The women work, too, and do not marry. (Goodness! Perolli, tell him it is too difficult to explain.)”
“He thinks,” said Perolli, “that you mean that in your country the young men live like priests and the women like sworn virgins, such as they sometimes have here. He’s very deeply shocked by such an idea. I’ll have to tell him something—what? Either way, he’ll get the idea that Americans are utterly immoral.”
“Well, say that we have—that we have another kind of marriage, that isn’t exactly marriage—say we have concubines. He’ll understand that, from Turkey,” said I, in desperation. And while Perolli endeavored to explain and still uphold the honor of America in the eyes of a profoundly shocked chief of Shala, I tried to devise another way of getting at the subject. For I did want to know what Albanian women felt about being married to men they had never seen, in strange tribes, and I knew they would never tell me through masculine interpreters. Lulash would know.
“But most of the sources of happiness that you mentioned are in the lives of men,” I said. “Are the women happy?”
“No,” said Lulash. “I do not think our women are happy.” He seemed deeply troubled; there were perplexity and anxiety in his dark eyes, and he moved restlessly—which Albanians almost never do—as he sat on the floor by the heap of coals in the baking dish. They had sunk quite into gray ashes; the bleak room was very cold, filled with the ceaseless swishing sound of the rain and of the innumerable waterfalls that poured from the mountains overhead.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking him this? Perhaps he is married to an unhappy woman?” I asked.
“No,” said Perolli. “He is not married; he is the only man in Shala who is not married.”
“Our women have their children; they love their children,” said Lulash. “And they do not quarrel with their husbands. It almost never happens that there are ugly words in a family. But I do not think the women are happy. I do not know whether they would be happier if they chose their own husbands. Girls of the marrying age are not very wise. But I often think, when I see a young girl taken away to the house of some old man, who perhaps is sick and ugly and morose because he must stay all day in the house, that it is a sad thing. For myself, I would like to see the American way tried here. I have said to my people that it is wrong to betroth children before they are born. We do not do it very often, now. Usually they are five or six years old, old enough so that one can see what they will become and what they will like. But parents do not often think of those things; they think more of marrying their children into a richer, stronger tribe, so that when war and bad seasons come there will be the strong, rich tribe to help them. Also, it is better for the child who is married into a good tribe. So that parents do not think much about the children themselves; they think more about the family and the tribe.”