My Father’s Books

The Globe

68 The Globe In the mid­ dle of ­ Father’s books was a sec­ tion with old ­ charts and maps as well as draw­ ings made by fa­ mous ­ travel writ­ ers from Eu­ rope or Asia who had ­ traveled ­ through the Bal­ kans. There were var­ i­ ous ­ systems for no­ tat­ ing car­ to­ graphic in­ for­ ma­ tion. Here jum­ bled to­ gether were alpha­ bets, ­ faiths, ­ planned itin­ er­ ar­ ies, all left be­ hind on the maps to main­ tain ­ people’s il­ lu­ sions of for­ mer glory. There was also a re­ lief map of the Bal­ kans, made a long time ago ac­ cord­ ing to the ideas of a ­ self-taught car­ tog­ ra­ pher. The un­ even­ ness of my ­ father’s soul was in­ scribed in the re­ lief, and some­ one look­ ing at it could ex­ am­ ine, in the re­ gion of inter­ est to him, all the vivid im­ pres­ sions that area had made on the eyes of that anon­ y­ mous map­ maker. On a great globe ­ Father had cor­ rected, added, and re­ moved some of the area rep­ re­ sent­ ing his na­ tive land on the re­ lief map made by that anon­ y­ mous au­ thor—a bit of lake, a bit of moun­ tain and val­ ley, a mon­ as­ tery on a hill­ top. He kept some parts, added some oth­ ers, mak­ ing­ changes ac­ cord­ ing to the nar­ ra­ tives of the old East­ ern and West­ ern travel­ ogues. My ­ father re­ mained vir­ tu­ ally ­ chained down in the Bal­ kans after the two trips he had made in his youth at the be­ gin­ ning of the twen­ ti­ eth cen­ tury, one to the East, to Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple and Cairo, the other to the West, to Rome and Ven­ ice. He re­ mained in his own per­ sonal Tower of Babel, which over­ flowed with books in var­ i­ ous lan­ guages and alpha­ bets, to pre­ pare for his great voy­ age, a con­ tin­ u­ a­ tion of his exile. But he did not have much luck with his Bal­ kan fate. ­ Events were set­ tled here with more dif­ fi­ culty than else­ where. 69 When he found a way out of the ruins of the Ot­ to­ man Em­ pire and broke his faith with the lab­ y­ rin­ thine Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple of his ­ mother’s iden­ tity, my ­ father set off to­ ward his ­ father’s coun­ try and to­ ward his Al­ ba­ nian iden­ tity. There he came up ­ against Fas­ cism. Flee­ ing from it, he came to an­ other coun­ try, a dif­ fer­ ent fate. Par­ a­ dox­ i­ cally, or how­ ever one views it, dur­ ing the Sta­ lin­ ist pe­ riod, al­ though caged in, he ex­ pe­ ri­ enced a time in which his fam­ ily could peace­ fully de­ velop. For the first time he was happy, truly happy, the happy Sis­ y­ phus with his fam­ ily. He knew that in the Bal­ kans, luck does not last long, so he con­ stantly pre­ pared for some new voy­ age. Sta­ lin­ ism shut all my ­ father’s il­ lu­ sions into a cage, but, ­ through his books, which res­ cued him at every phase of his great exile as he ­ passed from the ruins of one em­ pire into the lab­ y­ rinth of this new ideol­ ogy, he found his true exit. My ­ father never ­ traveled to the North on the Bal­ kan Ex­ press or to the East on the ­ Venice–Simplon Or­ i­ ent. As a re­ sult, as he sat among his sal­ vaged books in his Babel room, no one hin­ dered him from con­ tem­ plat­ ing and car­ ry­ ing out his jour­ neys. Among the maps, the ­ hand-drawn maps, and the re­ lief maps of the Bal­ kans, ­ Father had a globe that he had ­ brought from Con­ stan­ tin­ o­ ple, made at the be­ gin­ ning of the cen­ tury, when the Ot­ to­ man Em­ pire still ex­ isted. My ­ father ­ penned cor­ rec­ tions on this globe, add­ ing and sub­ tract­ ing as his­ tory de­ manded. Some­ times in the mid­ dle of the night or just at dawn he would get...