“Oh, we’ll have somebody make you some goatskin opangi,” said Perolli. “He won’t expect us very soon.” He flung out his arms in a jubilant gesture. “A besa of peace from Shala!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t have hoped for that! It means peace through the whole north; it means internal security for northern Albania—if I can only get the other tribes to join it.”
Frances and Alex came in, desperately anxious to know what had happened, and we three did a dance of pure delight. It was an inexpressible relief to know that Perolli would get out of Shala alive, and the besa was almost too much.
“But, Perolli,” said Frances, when I had told the whole conversation, “do you mean to say that these people are—are absolutely moral? I mean, as we understand morality? No love making along all these mountain trails? No illegitimate children? Never?”
“Never? Well, I have heard of one case,” said Perolli. “But don’t forget that such a thing would mean a blood feud between tribes. No man would make love to a girl of his own tribe, of course; a tribe traces its ancestry back to a common ancestor, and it would be like an American’s making love to his own sister. And if he seduced a girl of another tribe he would be involving hundreds of people. Men have to respect women in these mountains; they’re killed if they don’t, and not only they, but their families. A blood feud is no joke.
“However, I did hear of its happening once. The man’s family had to send word to the family of the girl to whom he was betrothed, to say that he could not marry her because he was going to have a child by another woman. The three tribes met in council and prevented a blood feud, but the man’s family had to pay his fiancée’s tribe ten thousand kronen, and ten thousand kronen to the family of the man that the other girl was engaged to. Then those two married, and the first man married the girl who was going to have his child. But it was a terrible disgrace to both their families.
THE SHOPPING CENTER IN TIRANA
These mountain women are admiring the strange weaving and color of bandana handkerchiefs and unbleached muslin from Europe. But they will sigh and content themselves with their own hand-woven silks and cottons, and if they buy anything, it will be the brightly painted cradle. An unbetrothed girl baby who was strapped into so fine a cradle might well hope to be married in Tirana or Scutari.
But he cut short our awed admiration for such a rigidly moral community. He was a man of Ipek, educated in Europe, and returned to Tirana, and his attitude to the ignorant tribes of these mountains was not one of admiration.
“They are really a wretched lot,” he declared. “Now, take a thing like this, for instance.” And he told us that in a house a few miles down the valley there was a nine-year-old girl held prisoner. The story was this:
A man of Pultit had betrothed his unborn child to the unborn child of a man of Shala, eighteen years ago. The two men, being friends, and one evening drinking rakejia together, had agreed that if one child proved to be a boy and the other a girl, they should marry. The wife of the Pultit man had protested; she did not like the tribe of Shala, and she did not like her husband’s friend, perhaps because he was too fond of rakejia. Besides, she was an ambitious woman, and said that if she had a daughter she would marry her in Scutari. Wild, irrational woman! But the compact was made, and nothing was left to her but to hope that both children would be boys, or both girls.