From Flutura Açka
To the sea, to the king
This is the expression that the Dutch major, Vuter de Vall, cried when he arrived in Vlora after months of isolation in Sinanaj of Tepelena and fighting in the whole area against Greek gangs and holy battalions, which, despite the obligation to vacate the occupied area, burned and they waited without pain for entire Albanian villages. Exactly 110 years ago. The Major had learned this expression from the Albanians, without knowing its clear meaning.
I remembered this episode when I ordered my morning coffee on the terrace of the Liman bar in Saranda, a heavenly balcony over the sea, so that in just a few minutes you can end wars, which, more than politics, are created by our minds. It is not for nothing that Nietzsche says that real wars are fought in the mind.
I don’t see from the concrete without urbanization, without aesthetics, without perspective, without patriotic pain of Saranda. Those who built, that is, destroyed, Saranda in these thirty years, are the biggest anti-Albanians in history. Here, and elsewhere along the Albanian coast. But Saranda has the sea. To the sea, to the king!
It’s Saturday, the situation is changing. The fish market at the harbor is overrun by the cries of boatmen, who have brought wild, expensive fish. It’s time for a good frappe, it gets really good here. Next to me are a couple of Sarandite ladies who are dealing with their families, with their health, with their family, with their faces. Human conversation. How I miss talking like this!
– Your wins look great, mine doesn’t!
– Leave it, my, that I can see you better, you are removed, but you look beautiful!
After a while, a smiling girl comes, she has two pigtails on her head, like two hanging sarandite palm trees. Her name is Esmeralda. He is no more than ten or twelve years old. Esmeralda begs, everyone knows her there, everyone in the bar knows her.
– Sit here, – he tells me.
– Sit down, – I say.
– Can you pay me a cocoa?
– I’ll pay, – I say.
Before finishing our dialogue, some boys from an adjacent table bring him a cup of sugar and cream, whose name I don’t know. I will pay him tomorrow. So we left it, along with a pizza for grandma. He tells me that his parents are far away, that he lives with his grandparents, that the last time his parents came from emigration, they bought him the suit he is wearing. He doesn’t go to school. He has never been to school. They don’t let him go to school!
I’m shocked. There is a law: every child must go to school, the family must take him. And I’m the political man who has to look into it, if the law is enforced. Like me, an entire system must ensure the education of every child. I ask Esmeralda to write, at least, her name. Do not know. I ask Esmeralda to draw a butterfly. Do not know. I google butterflies, and Esmeralda sees them and starts drawing on the paper and pen I give her, which she can’t even hold.
While Esmeralda is swatting the butterflies of the Internet, I write these words, not a little agitated. To the sea, to the sea, the word stuck to me. What will happen after a century with this movement? Who do I ask? The sea?!
Happy weekend, Friends!
