It’s been more than twelve years since either Kyle or I have set foot here in Kosovo, and we’ve heard continual rumors about its changes since the early postwar era. We can only hope so. When we met in Kosovo, it was riddled with bullet holes, and backup generators compensated for spotty electricity. Now we’ve booked a guesthouse online in the capital city of Pristina, an indication that people actually visit. Some of my village students now live in the city, having left rural life for urban jobs and apartments where they can raise children near schools. They are all adults now.
The city air smells like mountains, chilled and unrefined, and I still breathe in secondhand smoke. The forecast calls for snow this weekend, and I debate trawling the market for faux leather jackets, the same one I shopped at fifteen years ago (the last time I bought a jacket at the market, it melted when I set it on a radiator). A high-rise that once lost a wall and revealed a grid of Soviet-era flats has now been razed and replaced with a gleaming glass building. A bustling coffee shop stands where I used to buy pirated CDs. On Wednesday nights, Kyle and I would ride buses into this city and listen to jazz music at a bar. I wonder if it’s still there. I doubt I could find it again.
We park the car in downtown Pristina and walk pink-nosed to where we’ll meet our Albanian friends.
“It’s so cold here!” Tate says between chattering teeth.
“I can’t believe I remember this, but want to know how you say that in Albanian?” I ask, speeding up to ward off the chill.
“How?”
I laugh before I can get it out. “Un? jam? ft?ht?!” I shout, and the kids peal with laughter. I remember now that this was my favorite Albanian phrase for its onomatopoeian quality.
“What else do you remember?” Reed asks. I look at Kyle and raise my eyebrows.
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “I don’t remember a thing.”
We turn the corner into the wind. I shiver and say, “Hmm, let’s see . . . I remember how to say ‘I’m full.’ That one’s fun.”
“How?” Reed says, giggling.
“Un? jam? plot?.” The kids howl, then start to practice the phrase.
We turn another corner and Kyle says, “Whoa. This wasn’t here.” Our friends told us to meet them on the walking street, but the last time we were here, it was a potholed thoroughfare for cars. It’s been transformed to a cobblestone boulevard where pedestrians now stroll in the early spring evening.
Skender is waiting for us on the street with his new wife, Jackie, an American English teacher. They met at an English-speaking high school in Pristina started by my former coworkers. Skender and Jackie now help run the place.
“Tsh! Kyle!” He waves us over.
We cross the street to hug Skender and shake Jackie’s hand. He looks like the same kid with a few extra laugh lines and gray hairs. Fifteen years ago he would sit at my kitchen table and recite her and hair, unable to hear the difference. I remember him walking in on a hot day and proudly declaring, “I am a sweater!” I affectionately nicknamed him Smiling Skender.
I hear footsteps, and a familiar voice says, “Mir?mbr?ma, shoqet.” Beqir, Kyle’s old roommate, is standing behind him.
“Beq! What in the world!” Kyle says.
“Skender texted me and let me know you were here,” he says. He looks unchanged as well. The postwar years have been kind to our friends.
We walk to a trendy brick restaurant off the walking street, and we dine on wine and memories. The electricity never once blacks out and the Italian food is delicious. Skender tells us stories about a recent trip to Washington, DC. We can’t possibly be in Kosovo.
“The changes here are really remarkable,” Kyle says between bites.
Skender and Beq nod. “It’s not even the same country, right?” Beq says.
“I really can’t believe it,” I say.
“It’s not all perfect,” adds Skender. “Unemployment is huge here. Young people are all leaving for Germany because they can’t find jobs.” Earlier this morning I read something about this, about Kosovo’s growing pains as Europe’s youngest country.
“Well, looks like you guys lucked out,” Kyle says.
“It helps enormously to know English,” Skender says. His eyes are grateful. He now teaches in English at a school he helped found.
The next morning, we drive our rental car to the village. Kyle remembers the bends in the road and I remember the terra-cotta tiles on the roofs we pass, the same ones we passed countless times when we took the bus into the city and wondered whether our future included each other. The car curves around the lake embedded in the rolling hills that always marked our proximity to the village. We’re almost there.
Kyle pulls into the parking lot of the lakeside restaurant where we had our first meal, where we had dozens of meals afterward. Distorted music blares indoors, as usual, but the gazebo near the water is open and quiet. A waiter seats us, and he’s sporting the same white dress shirt and black tie uniform as before, better suited for a four-star establishment instead of an esplanade café.
We order our usual—chicken, a plate of fries sprinkled with feta cheese, sparkling water, wine. I’m disappointed that lake crap is no longer on the menu, but I’m glad they still proudly serve beefsteak in hell. The food tastes the same—hearty, simple, eastern European. The kids play on the restaurant playground after they eat and we sip cappuccinos. I don’t recall the playground’s existence in 2000, but it wasn’t on my radar then.
We pay our bill, then drive over a bridge that didn’t exist fifteen years ago (Milo?evi? had bombed the original nineteenth-century bridge, so villagers built a wooden overpass, like a playground suspension bridge, only poorly constructed). I show the kids where I once lived—a kitchen window and balcony on the second floor of a Soviet-era concrete building, where I would check to see if Kyle was driving down the road.
The official spot on the road where we met was outside my kitchen window. We put our rental car in park, walk to the spot, and take a family photo with our hair flying in the wind. This is it. We made it back. These three kids exist because of this patch of concrete.
The kids are freezing and beg to return to the car, so they leave the two of us on the road. We kiss, and I imagine old ladies peeking from behind their curtains. Albanian children giggle around us. I want to high-five my twenty-four-year-old self, whisper in her ear that everything would work out with the lanky Oregon boy with the derelict Volkswagen van.
19
TURKEY