Balkan Library

"Irrevocable Summer", Besnik Mustafaj

Albanian, first edition, 184 p., price 5 lv., 2004

Copyright © 1989 by Besnik Mustafaj
First published under the original title VERA PA KTHIM
by Nairn Frasheri, Tirana, 1989

Translator from Albanian: Marina Marinova

The novel, Irrecoverable Summer, is an original confession of the frantic thirst of a woman to see her dream come true.
The story takes place in Tirana in the 1980s. The protagonists, Sana and Gori, are engaged to be married and Gori has made a besa (a pledge, stronger than a sworn vow, which even death cannot revoke) that when they get married they will spend at least two weeks of their honeymoon at the beach in Dures. In the meantime, however, after the capitulation of Italy, the country is occupied by Nazi Germany. Shortly after that Gori is accused of conspiracy, arrested and sent to a camp in Matthausen. Less than a few months have passed before Sana receives a message that Gori was executed on June 29. It is two score years later that she learns he was not executed on June 29 but on July 13. Shaken by the fact that during all these years she has thought the first is the date of his demise – while Gori was actually alive, probably hoping to save himself from that hell and making plans for their future – Sana is stung with remorse and feels she is debtor to his memory. Thus, neither dreaming nor awake, the heroine pictures in her mind the return of her beloved, their marriage and their departure to the seaside to spend together two weeks of their dreamed honeymoon.
In the end, after their imagined happiness, the two separate at the station in Dures, where her loving husband gets off the train to buy something for breakfast and disappears, leaving no trace. The train starts off, taking Sana to the capital city, where she will return to the living to continue her woeful fate of an unmarried loner, and she whispers quietly, “Don’t you remember that he has to return to Matthausen? He has a long way to go before he gets there on July 13, because death waits for nobody…”
Irrecoverable Summer is a 150-page novel, written in a precise and poetic language, which makes it particularly interesting and absorbing to read. It was published in Tirana by ARBRI in 1992.