Feet planted firmly, the child faced the tall group of us, flung back her hair, and continued defiantly to speak: “It is not just. Is it my fault I am a girl? Is it my fault that I am too small to work in the mill? I go with the sheep, I carry the lamb, I climb the trees and cut leaves. I bring water from the spring.” She beat her breast. “And my brother gets new trousers, and also a handkerchief! I, I have nothing! I have nothing to wear to the Easter mass, and my brother has new white trousers! And my brother has a handkerchief!” She stamped her bare foot. “I say to the world that it is not just. I shall cry to the Five Tribes that it is not just!”
“My word, but she’s magnificent!” said Frances.
“Tell her quickly, Rexh—she shall have a handkerchief—she shall have two handkerchiefs,” said Alex.
“Glory to your lips,” said the child, for an instant unbroken by the happiness. Then she swung her tangled hair across her face and fled, weeping.
It was curiosity as much as the renewed violence of rain which made us follow her down the trail and go into the little house. Two women welcomed us on the doorstep and led us into darkness lightened by a handful of fire. They were mother and grandmother, both haggard and worn by work. They had no coffee and no sugar, but they welcomed us to their house by offering each in turn a cup of hot water, with all the ceremonies of coffee drinking. They thanked us beautifully for the handkerchief we had given their boy—the little girl had not yet returned to the house—and we thanked them for the three eggs. He was a good boy, they said, fourteen years old, and he had built the mill and worked in it. A clever, good boy. The new trousers lay on the earthen floor, carefully wrapped in a cloth; while she talked, the mother unwrapped them and worked on the black Shala pattern. The boy’s father had been killed in the Serbian retreat of 1914, but the boy had been too young to fight. And the little girl was born on the mountains while their village was burning. But the boy—always the talk returned to the boy, and it was easy to see why he had the new Easter trousers.
“Perhaps it is unjust to the girl, but it is because they are so poor,” Padre Marjan said, as we went home through the gathering darkness. “And I am sure she did not mean to beg. But you see they have so little, and they do give all they have to the boy. After all, he is the head of the family, and he is a good boy; he works their land and he works in the mill; he keeps them all alive.”
“And out of such poverty they sent us three eggs,” said Alex.
Padre Marjan asked what she had said, and when he was told he answered, “My people are poor and ignorant, but they know what is due a guest.”
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Mountaineers.