Vajtim (Lamentation of the Dead)
Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion? Who can draw a sharp line between sleep and death? Who, O Lord, can draw a sharp dividing line between present, past and future?
Danilo Kiš, The Legend of the Sleepers
The room was sterile and uninviting. Cold fluorescent lights radiated from the ceiling. The white walls were bare, save for a few framed images that hung in the center of the space, opposite the main entrance, above a small cushioned chair. The gray carpet was similarly unappealing. To the left, in the corner, was a queen size bed. A collection of multi-colored wires laid atop the comforter, arranged in a precise manner. Across from the bed, flush with the front wall, a dresser decorated with a small vase and single artificial flower. A television hovered above the dresser, and could be seen from the chair in the middle of the room. A large mirror sat on the far right wall, reflecting the monochromatic scene.
The elderly technician explained the regiment for the evening, as Helena again explains it to me now. She was to sleep uninterrupted from approximately 11pm to 5am. Following this, she would take a series of twenty minute naps until the early afternoon. In between each of these allotted periods, she would be asked to recount her dreams from the preceding session.
Helena tells me about the woman that assisted her, whom she says was very sweet. I forget her name at the moment, but I know Helena was extremely comforted by her presence. She tells me the woman was seventy years old, the same age as her mother.
The technician explained to Helena how she had gone back to school to study polysomnography some twenty years ago. She had been a social worker before this, and while she found great meaning in her profession, she became interested in the exploratory aspects of sleep study. She remarked to Helena enthusiastically, “A lot is still unknown”.
Over the next hour - although there was no clock, and therefore no way to know how much time had gone by - the technician outfitted Helena with the colored wires which had been laid neatly across the bed. One by one, she placed the adjoining sensors on different parts of Helena’s body; two on her scalp, one on each temple, and another on her forehead, all of which recorded brain waves and eye movements; two on her chin, one on her neck, a collection of others on her arms and legs to monitor other motor-neuron functions, an elastic band around her chest and abdomen to measure respiration, an oximeter on her finger to document blood oxygen levels, and a large tablet into which this mass of knotted circuitry was fed.
Helena crawled into the bed in the corner of the room. She laid there in the darkness, waiting to fall asleep, praying for respite, like she had many times before. Her eyes fluttered, her limbs jolted, her heart rate increased, she began to sweat. She thought about the countless other wakeful nights in her life. They all came rushing back to her in this moment of ghastly anticipation.
“The winters were brutal,” she says calmly. “My mother and I used to fill large plastic coca-cola bottles with boiling water and place them at our feet and in between our legs. We spent many nights like this, huddled together for warmth”.
She tells me about their conversations on these nights; mostly about different people and things they did. Friends, relatives, and some who were strangers then, but would in time come to occupy Helena’s thoughts. Other times her mother would share stories about her past, describing things she had seen and done, treating each memory like a parable. It was during these frequent and protracted moments of discomfort, these sleepless yet elucidating nights - which themselves now recur in brief moments of repose - that Helena tells me she grew increasingly close to her mother.
“We were attached at the hip” she says in an unsettling, yet sentimental manner.
“Even more so after my father died”.
She remembers looking through the empty window frame of their (still) unfinished house, the one that had been built by the catholic church after the war. Her father would sometimes sleep there by himself, before anyone else had moved in.
The space was barren and uninviting. There was no furniture or decorations, nothing to be mentioned; only the cold musty odor of the bare clay bricks and cement floor.
Through the window frame in the wall, she saw her father. Her mother washed his naked body in the yard, before the women performed vajtim, the lamentation of the dead.
Helena sat between her mother and her sister-in-law. A small circle of mourners - relatives and friends - surrounded the bier that displayed her father’s immaculate corpse. Howling in unison, they eulogized Nikollë Deda; a husband, a romantic, a father (at times). He had left behind his wife Marta and his young daughter Helena.
She recalls the glass of water her mother left beside her father’s mattress. “Upon the passing of a loved one”, she explains, “you’re supposed to leave a glass of water so the dead can quench their thirst before departing the terrestrial plane”. After having left this spot and returned again later that same day, she tells me she found the same glass half emptied, sitting in the same spot beside her father’s mattress, in the otherwise empty room.
A disembodied voice called her name, “Helena, Helena…”
The elderly technician entered the room and unplugged her from the tangled circuitry. “Two wires came off my chest, and two stayed on,” Helena explains. “She left the head attachments on as well. The leg ones were taken off. And the rest remained as they were”.
“You mustn’t sleep until the next session”, whispered the woman. She motioned to Helena to sit up. “You need to stay awake for another ninety minutes”.
Helena moved again from the bed to the cushioned chair in the middle of the room, retracing the short path she had taken just some hours before; although there was no clock, and therefore no way to be certain how much time had elapsed. She sat there, staring at the bare walls, resisting the intense corporal urge to sleep.
The fluorescent lights penetrated her eyelids, creating an acute illusory palinopsia. A deep golden-orange hue supplanted her field of vision, along with negative traces of objects in the room. The color was curious, and yet redolent of something familiar.
“We were sitting next to the open window, in case we needed to leave abruptly. I think it was my mom, me, definitely my dad, and Kiko. Edi couldn't have been there, he had already joined the UÇK. Henri wasn't there either. And another person that could've been there was Kiko's best friend at the time, Labinot. His father had already been killed”.
“I was sitting in my mothers lap on one of the golden velvet couches along the far wall from the entrance of the room, underneath the large window that marked the back of the house. Another couch and two armchairs lined the perimeter of the space. The floor was covered with multiple rugs, layered densely on top of eachother. In the center of the room, at our feet, was a low wooden coffee table with a glass top. To our immediate left, a second window, beneath which sat a large electrical heater. Directly adjacent, flush with the front wall - on top of a small stand - was an old television that rarely worked”.
Helena looks at me, and then around the room, as if confirming where she is.
There are photographs displayed on the walls. Some of my own family, and others of hers. Her mother, her father, her grandparents, her siblings, her nieces and nephews. A picture hangs in our living room - a color photograph - above the bookshelf on the wall facing the couch. Helena stands in the middle of the frame, between her mother and father, with two men on either side.
The note on the back of the photograph reads:
Tiranë April 5th 1999, Family Picture
Two men, one on the left, Prend Caka. And the other on the right is Gjon Caka, who both live in Tirana.
Husband and wife, with daughter in the middle. Caka family from Peja Kosovo who came to Tirana as a result of forced displacement on March 28th 1999.
Nikollë Caka
Marta Caka wife
Helena Caka daughter
Cousins from the same bloodline at the monument of Skanderbeg.
“I woke up in a garden”, she tells me softly. “I couldn’t see much”.
“There was a man hanging string lights in different positions, illuminating fragments of the empty space. I was watching him from above. I don’t know how much time passed, but the man eventually settled on the arrangement. He extended the lights straight in front of me, into the darkness, towards an imagined horizon”.
“It was pitch black, and yet the sky was bright, illuminated by explosions in the near distance. My mother held me tightly”.
“The next thing I remember I was entering a room. The floor was covered with bodies. They were lying face down with their foreheads resting on their arms. The room was nondescript. Straight ahead of me there was an opening in the wall, and beyond that a hallway to the left”.
“As I stepped gently through the bodies, I heard a voice calling to me”.
The bright fluorescent lights reflected off the cold, bare walls, creating an ever intenser glare. A gentle and familiar voice beckoned to Helena to sit up, but the instruction failed to register. She drifted between restlessness and wakefulness, between memory and lucidity, between dream and reality.
She looked around, uncertain of where she was.