Masks

Savor the word break. Its stark, plosive snap. Its multiplicity: break through, break in, break down, break up. It’s a word with many faces, many branching paths. One by one, you and I cross them all.

March: spring break.

Our first morning in Shkodër, the call to prayer startles me awake in the ashen unlight. The muezzin’s cry breaks into the bunk-room like a thieving angel, and though I’ve never believed in God, God I wish I knew how to pray. Exultation sears the air. You’re still sleeping, a few feet away, in a matching twin bed. Otherwise, the room is deserted. It’s early in the tourist season, according to Rob, the soft-spoken bald American managing the hostel. Construction is everywhere. Everyone says: give it a few years. Cynical headshakes. It’ll be swamped before you know it. We shake our heads, too, as if we aren’t also here.

Google says: the call to prayer is the Fajr, given before sunrise in remembrance of God.

From the hostel’s rooftop, the mosque minarets are fairytale towers. While you get ready, I sit eating boiled eggs and cucumber sliced by Rob. The pedestrian square below is crisscrossed and fluttering with colorful flags, sidewalks lined with gift shops, and restaurants advertising English menus, each polished facet colliding with the comfortable chaos and texture of daily life. Church steeples breach the skyline like stalagmites. Eastern Orthodox, all orange stone and sinuous yellow curves. Saint Stephen’s, a hulking Catholic cathedral. A city given to worship and history. Scarred, like all the Balkans.

Soon you join me on the roof, studying the gray slabs of mountains. We talk tenderly, without saying much. Over the past few days, we’ve fought a lot. Just stresses of travel. At school, people whisper about how I’m too liberal and you’re too conservative. We laugh that off, don’t let it bother us, right? The trouble is how we argue. Like war, sometimes. Detonation. Little things blow up: free will, or theater, or Gaza. Sometimes I don’t know how you can believe the things you believe. Love bridges any chasm, doesn’t it? If you asked me about the future, our future, I wouldn’t know what to say. But you don’t ask.

Smile: a selfie of us squinting into the scorched radiance, holding each other close.

At night, Rob pulls clear plastic water bottles from the hostel fridge and pours shots of raki. Vicious shit, homemade. You won’t drink it. An older Turkish guy named Deniz tells me about his business (hospitality) and the state of global politics (bad). He says the word Balkan comes from an ancient Ottoman phrase: bal, meaning honey; kan, meaning blood. People come here for the honey, he declares, but it always ends in blood.

Rob teaches us how to say cheers in Albanian: Gëzuar! The raki burns as fervently as the muezzin’s prayer song. Could be blood or honey or both.

In the morning, we rent beat-up bicycles and take the pitted road out of town. The traffic scares you, which makes you snappy, which makes me annoyed. The houses get older, grayer. Decades uncoil. The sun burns like raki.

After a few anxious miles, we reach the Venetian mask factory Rob told us about, the white complex sprawling beneath a black billboard. The gate hangs open, so we lean our bikes against the courtyard wall. A wide building turns out to be the workshop, where a guided tour is already underway. No one stops us from joining the group.

A dozen long tables rib the room, piled with plaster and paint and leering, cackling masks. Old men and women work with cracking hands, ignoring us. Thousands of masks to be finished, then shipped to Italy. In the gift shop, we both buy small masks, mummify them in plastic-wrap. One for my dad, one for your mom. Something to remember ourselves by. To preserve us, like the Fajr boiling through dawn. A mask is a kind of prayer—to be someone else, something new.

Confession: in nineteen days, at school in the dark, I will tell you I’m done. Break. A raw, aching word.

The walls of the gift shop are encrusted with likenesses of unfathomable variety. Jesters, monsters, mourners. We drift between them, the eyeless faces staring. I want to ask them what they see. Are we blood or honey? I want to ask you, too, but don’t.

We leave with our masks, together. The world outside drowns in light.