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Of how Aleks left his homeland to reunite with his brothers

Some men have the same face since they are born, except for a few little details here and there, a moustache, the gray hair, a random scar… the semblance of old souls is imprinted on them. They just die older and their soul keeps migrating from body to body in their search for eternity, for the union with the Cosmic Mind.

Such is the case of Aleks. Take away the thick moustache and the strands of gray hair on the sides of his head and you find the same air of defeat, the same longing for a state of being not achieved, the same anxiousness for searching. They are all present in his first photograph at age five, in 1877 after a labor day in the family farm in the village of Drenova in southeastern Albania, as in this other one dated 1947, a few months before his death in Bucharest, Hungary.
If one characteristic he must be remembered by, it should his curiosity for knowing his roots, his mad love for his country -no, not Albania as the Westerners and Soviets had renamed it, but Shquipëria, as it is called by the nationals in the ancient language of Illyrian. “Shquipëria, Shquipëria”, he repeats with languor like a mantra as if holding to the last vestige of a culture that survived the Greek, Roman, Slavic and Turk invasions.

“How was my mother?” he asked his father at age ten while helping his father toll the field with an oxen. “She was like autumn leaves chased by the wind, like a passing moment that escapes us, or a summer night’s dream that veils its trace”. He never asked again. Not to his father, who grew ill day by day, or his two older brothers who had left to Hungary earlier the same year in search of a better life. “Why did my brothers leave?” he asked candidly his father. “They grew tired of my melancholy and so will you, if I don’t beat you to it”. This last part was more a mumbling than a response, and less a thought than a menace. The sun shone hard on the squalid soil, away from the gentle breezes of the Adriatic. Two shepherds hushed in the distance to a large flock of goats. The ruins of a Roman castle where his brothers used to spook him watched from a nearby hill. Ideas boiled in Alek’s mind.

Later in his room he repeated in the language he had learned in elementary school: “”. Was it then when he decided to be a poet?These very same lines are found in his poem “Forgotten Memories” contained in his third and last book Psallme Murgu (Psalms of a Monk) published in Bucharest in 1930. In one of his diaries he wrote: “Maybe one does not decide to be a poet, one is chosen by the Muses, one is entrapped, incarcerated, and raped by them. They never let go of you. You do not want to leave”.

The day he found his father hanging from the high beam in the living room, he did not blink or cry. He readied himself to attend school like always. He presented and successfully passed his oral exams. He met with the Headmaster and explained he would not be attending high school after all. “I have to leave the country. My brothers need me”. “How about your father?” Mr. Noli inquired. “Not him, he does not need me. He has all he needs and is where he wants to be”. He walked back home at 3:00 PM. On returning to the house he did not look at the corpse. He went to his room, packed a few belongings on a small valise and took his diary under the arm. He went then to the living room and said “You beat me to it”. He then left the house and started his trip to Bucharest, in search of his brothers. He was thirteen years old.