Antigona and Me E-Book

Kate Clanchy

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 363

Beschreibung

'An absolutely wonderful book' - Deborah Moggach In a London street at the turn of the twenty-first century, two neighbours start to chat over the heads of their children. Kate Clanchy is a writer, privileged and sheltered. Antigona is a refugee from Kosovo. On instinct, Kate offers Antigona a job as a nanny, and Antigona accepts. Over the next five years and a thousand cups of coffee Antigona's extraordinary story slowly emerges. She has escaped from a war, she has divorced a violent husband, but can she escape the harsh code she was brought up with? At the kitchen table where anything can be said, the women discover they have everything, as well as nothing, in common.

Leseprobe

‘An absolutely wonderful book.’    Deborah Moggach

‘Educational, entertaining, moving’    Scotsman

‘Clanchy’s book says something important about female refugees, who are often as much in flight from aspects of their old life as persecution. Male immigrants dominate the news, but there are many women like Antigona in Western Europe, doing their best for their children and living in constant fear that their efforts won’t be enough . . .

[T]he book is a tribute to their friendship. But it is also about the vulnerability of marginal women, of whom Antigona’s fate is tragically emblematic’

Joan Smith, Sunday Times

‘The portrait of a brilliant, violent Albanian family torn from its rocky roots is only half the point . . . what Clanchy learns about herself, about her country and the way it treats those who seek protection – all of this is as painful, flawed and true as what she learns about Antigona and Albania.

Clanchy is a poet, and this is a poets’ book, earthily written and packed with precise imagery . . . a scholarly book, well-researched and accurate, and not least a political book, which asks if we properly value mother-love, and how we can change the balance between rich and poor.’    Carole Angier, Independent

‘Clanchy’s is a set of eyes we can trust. Her struggle to understand Antigona’s abusive husband mirrors our own, and her richly suggestive language, revealing her background, brings sinister undertones to the women who gather to inspect the bridal bedsheets and read “sentence of the stain.” Such a Western female perspective makes this more than a “refugee”’s story. It becomes instead a narrative of convergence; an exploration of being female, of cultural conditioning and, most importantly, of sisterhood.’    New Statesman

‘Clanchy has an eye for detail and a good ear for dialogue – part of her poet’s training. But in this long-form writing style which is for her a new departure she displays a wonderful feel for narrative nuance’    Sunday Telegraph

‘Remarkably lucid’    Evening Standard

Antigona and Me

ALSO BY KATE CLANCHY

NOVELS

Meeting the English

POEMS

Slattern

Samarkand

Newborn

Selected Poems

The Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)

England: Poems from a School (ed.)

NON-FICTION

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

SHORT STORIES

The Not-Dead and the Saved

KATE CLANCHY

Antigona and Me

SWIFT PRESS

This edition published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

First published as What is She Doing Here?by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan 2008

Copyright © Kate Clanchy 2008

The right of Kate Clanchy to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-186-6eISBN: 978-1-80075-185-9

For the real Antigona, and the women behind her.

Contents

Preface

  1 The Kosovan Woman

  2 Highlanders

  3 Dirty, Clean, and the Kanun of Lek

  4 How She Left Him

  5 Pastoral: A Collection of All the Other Things Antigona Knows How to Do and I Don’t

  6 The Mountain Woman, the Pasha’s Wife, and the Problem

  7 Nannies, Maids, and The Revenger’s Tragedy

  8 Albanian Stories

  9 Who Do They Think They Are?

10 Your Nanny, Your Mum

Epilogue: Flora’s CV

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

Spring 2005, London Fields. I am walking across the park with Antigona, a baby, and a toddler. I’m going somewhere: I’m wearing my good coat, carrying my briefcase, heading for the station. Antigona is in nanny mode: pushchair, cut-offs, hi-tops. Nanny is one of the things she is to me: also neighbour, protégée, cleaner, confidante, and friend. Something struggles in the grass near the road, flutters a grey wing – a feral pigeon, surely, bashed by a bus. I look away – sick animals scare me – but Antigona darts forward, picks the bird up by the briefly fanned pinion, and folds it into her hands. A light stripe flashes at its neck: a wood pigeon, I realize with a pang, one of the sweet plump creatures which sometimes ornament the London plane trees and send their deep rural coos through the blare of the traffic.

Soft matter falls from the bird. Antigona holds it deftly clear, then walks over to show me: the dove has died in her cupped hands, its eyes shut, its beak slightly bloody and meekly bent on its soft pink breast, a perfect little martyr. ‘He gave up just like a person,’ she says wonderingly. And then: ‘Just like my cousin.’

‘In the War?’ I ask. Antigona is a refugee of the 1999 Kosovan War.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Just in his bed. I was child. I went to help my aunty, my Mum send me. My cousin is in bed, long time sick, breathing like that, like the bird.’

‘Struggling?’

‘Yes. And I go in, take his hand, and he give up. Just like that.’

Antigona lays the body tenderly in a clump of dock leaves. ‘So he can get better,’ she tells the toddler, who is anxious, ‘get mended.’ And she invites her to ‘chase Nanny’, and, after a few skirmishes round the pushchair, returns to the conversation she’d been haranguing me with previously, in which I was trying and failing to explain why I prefer not to shop at Primark. The whole incident – the countrywoman’s skill with which she picked up the bird, the elemental grace with which she gave the creature its death, the vignette of her lost country, the spin back to the twenty-first-century consumer culture which she has so wholeheartedly adopted, the sublime and the banal effortlessly juxtaposed – is utterly typical of her. ‘When I get back,’ I think, and it is a familiar, almost weary thought, ‘I’ll have to write it down.’

For I had been writing about Antigona for years, by then – ever since I met her, in fact, back in 2001. As I’d got to know her, I’d also read books on Kosovo and asked her questions about them – almost as if I were conducting research. In fact, since the new baby, this seemed to be the only writing I was actually completing. Some of my early notes had grown into something like short stories; others were dated lists or bald accounts of library forays interspersed with Antigona Quotes in italic; still others were pages of dialogue, like sketches for radio plays. However much I wrote, I still had the harassing sense of falling behind, of missing the best bits, because at that time Antigona seemed to be telling me her life in vast chunks, filling my helpless ears with horrors like Coleridge’s Wedding-Guest’s. And her story wouldn’t stop: some particularly dramatic incidents had actually, recently, occurred in my kitchen. It was becoming, I thought as I stood on the station platform, a problem. Perhaps I should stop listening to Antigona, recover my voice and write another book of poetry. Unless I was writing a book already. In which case, I should probably stop that. After all, I didn’t write prose, and this wasn’t my life, and Antigona was my employee.

No: ‘employee’ was wrong. That sounded as if I had a company, she a desk. Antigona cleared up for me, she put the baby on the breast for me, she scraped the shit off the nappies for me: Antigona was my servant, and just thinking the word, let alone admitting it in print, made me burn with shame. I was supposed to be a liberal, a feminist, not an oppressive overlord. And even if I followed the advice I always gave out at Creative Writing classes – ‘write the thing you are most ashamed of, because that is where the interest lies’ – it seemed hardly fair to do so on Antigona’s, rather than my own, behalf. I had power over Antigona: I paid her and wrote her references. What is more, I had thirty-nine years of speaking English and eighteen years of studying it to her tenuous five. She would never be able to control my medium of literature, and it seemed like another kind of servitude to conscript her into it, to steal her plot for its drama and colour: it seemed like appropriation, which is a polite word for theft.

These were the reasons, I supposed, why I had never developed my Antigona files into anything I wanted to publish. Yet her story compelled me, and it wasn’t just the drama; it was because it seemed resonant, representative. When I read the news, or caught discussions on the radio, or talked to friends, I found myself thinking of Antigona, quoting her, telling a tale from her life to illustrate my point, whether about feminism or immigration or Eastern Europe or Tony Blair. Hers was the voice which was missing from these discussions, from our public discourse, hers and the voice of many exploited immigrants, especially women: I felt that more and more strongly. I knew Antigona thought that too, and that she had, moreover, a strong sense of herself as a special person, a pioneer, someone of destiny. Perhaps she might want to be memorialized. She would certainly, I reminded myself, have a view on the matter, because she has views on everything. Just because she has never read a book in English doesn’t mean she does not know that books are powerful things. I should ask. So I did, a few days later, when she had just finished filling in the details of one of her great escapes.

‘How would you feel if I wrote your life down, Antigona? Like, in a book?’

‘Good,’ she said at once, as if she had already thought of it. ‘Good. And then a feature film, actually. Miniseries.’

I said I didn’t think I could deliver on the feature film front, but that I thought her story was very interesting and exciting and—

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It makes me feel happy – a book. It makes me feel relaxed. For me. And because there are a thousand women behind me in this country, having shit lives, ’scuse my language. No one can understand their lives, here. They are stuck, they cannot move forward. It takes one to break the ice.’

‘Break the ice’ has always suggested to me a thin frozen layer over faces at a party: something, like the gloss on crème brûlée, to be cracked with a toffee hammer. Now, in Antigona’s brilliant inversion, I saw that the ice for her was thick: opaque, grey lake ice, and she and the other women were under it, knocking. If she broke through, a torrent would follow.

I didn’t think I could write anything that would have any such dramatic effect. Nor could I turn out the sensational novelization which I suspected Antigona had in mind: I couldn’t pretend to imagine being her, because one of the things she had taught me was that our two cultures had made us profoundly, not superficially, different. I was starting to think of another book, a book about that difference. Not Antigona’s story as it happened to her, but her story as it happened to me: as I heard it, as I researched it and imagined it; as it made me think; as it changed me. I would put myself in the book as I was and am: me with all my ignorances and prejudices and losses of temper, me with my large, British, liberal behind, and the reader would have to consciously peer past me, would never be allowed to forget that this was a particular, partial view of a life, not a life itself. In the house, in our conversations, Antigona and I were always equals, shocking and irritating each other with our differences, certainly, but never losing our sense of closeness: the feeling that in one another, we had met our equivalent, our match. I would write about that exchange.

‘Because I never think – you know – what I want to say in the book, is that you and I know different things, but I never think you are stupider than me, ever,’ I blurted out to Antigona. She went pink, her jaw tightened, and she nodded.

‘You have the right feeling for me. You will write the right thing. Stop worrying,’ she said.

Antigona’s absolute trust in me made some things easier, and some harder. The issues of what to include and what to censor were actually relatively easy to decide: I simply asked Antigona, in person or on the phone, what she thought about a particular issue or incident, and then read out or summarized – because Antigona is often baffled by my written register, and bored, let’s be honest, with my philosophizing – what I was writing to make sure she was content. But I was much less sanguine than Antigona about her privacy: I could see harm coming to her from the book, from her own community above all, but also from the media and even from the law. So, from the beginning, I changed all names and all locations, and further protected the identities of members of her family by altering ages and degrees of kinship and by using composite characters. This was made easier for me when some of the principal actors in the story coincidentally left the country. No character in this book should now be identified with any particular person of Kosovan origin currently living in the UK.

Nevertheless, Antigona and I wanted, from the outset, for the book to be as truthful as possible, and in this cause I have stuck as closely as possible to the facts as they appeared to me, while still maintaining Antigona’s disguise. I have actually invented only a few sentences of this text, but I have occasionally transposed or edited narratives, always down a key, making the plot line less, not more, sensational. There must be other inventions here, though, of which I am not aware, because all the stories in this book are told and retold, by Antigona, by me, by Antigona’s relatives, and sometimes by third or fourth parties. Sometimes I also present facts which I have learned from books or articles: these are not intended to be fictions and any errors are mine. The copyright is mine too, but I nevertheless regard this as a shared text. I have already paid to Antigona more than I have received in advance for this book, and if the book goes on to make more money, then I shall tithe it to her and to her children. I am still constantly in touch with all of them, and very much aware of their needs.

That day in London Fields, I watched Antigona from the high station platform, strolling at toddler pace across the park, and was struck by how ordinary she suddenly looked, in the same way that her feline beauty falls away from her in photographs, where she often appears small, shrunken-cheeked, scowling. No one will notice her, I thought, as she stooped to pick up the little one from a tumble, except perhaps to wonder idly if she is Brazilian or Italian; no one will look twice at an immigrant woman with a pushchair of blond children, a mobile phone flashing at her ear. It is only I and the children who saw her don the guise of the Goddess Isis, giver of life and death, and doff it again, easily as rubber gloves; it is only we who witnessed her encapsulate, in a gesture, the beauty and violence and tenderness of another, rapidly disappearing, way of life. That act was not on any record, nor were most of the extraordinary acts of her extraordinary life: she was, at best, a statistic. I knew her as much more. If I took the path of ignoring the story I had been given, of suppressing that vision, I would be joining the crowds who walked past her. But if I wanted, instead, I could go home and start writing it down.

1

The Kosovan Woman

No one in the West who has seen what is happening in Kosovo can doubt that NATO’s military action is justified. Bismarck famously said the Balkans were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian Grenadier. Anyone who has seen the tear-stained faces of the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming across the border, heard their heartrending tales of cruelty or contemplated the unknown fates of those left behind, knows that Bismarck was wrong.

Tony Blair, April 1999

‘Where are they from, that family?’ said my husband one afternoon in early 2001. Spring: we had the front window open. ‘I keep seeing them in the street. Like Italians, but they’re not speaking Italian. That’s not Greek, is it?’

I peered out. A young woman, two girls – early teenagers with long plaits of hair – and a round-eyed little boy were filling the pavement with their clamour. I’d often seen them before. Once, mother and daughters had come screaming down the street, wailing and keening, the little boy slung like luggage over his mother’s shoulder. ‘I think,’ I said, remembering recent newscasts, ‘I think they might be from the former Yugoslavia.’

‘Haven’t they all gone home?’

‘Not if they can help it, I shouldn’t think.’

A few days later, I meet the woman and her son in the street. The little boy is carrying a yellow balloon with ‘Liberal Democrat’ on it. In seconds, he has presented it to my toddling baby, and is hugging and kissing him. The woman squats down and hugs the baby too. It is his blondness, I think, that excites these effusions, his non Angli sed angeli. It reminds me of being on family holidays in Italy in the seventies, when my similarly golden-haired brother would be clasped to upholstered black bosoms until he fainted.

Not that this woman is upholstered. She is spry, elegant, quick, and the pony tail of black hair down her back is magnificently shiny and alive. She raises her head to look at me. A beautiful face: the poise and proportions and kholed dark eyes of a cheetah. She jumps up, and I see we are going to talk.

‘Are you from Yugoslavia?’

‘Kosovo.’

‘Ah.’ I make a warm, generally approving noise. ‘Three children?’

‘Yes. You one?’

‘Just one.’ She picks up my hand. She is looking for a wedding ring, I realize. I show her, expecting the sort of cloying moral congratulations, the sort of glad-handing that used to embarrass me in Kashmir or Anatolia, but instead she shows me her own hands. They are worn, brown, strong, with pronounced knuckles – and bare.

‘I am dee-vorced,’ she says, and looks closely at me, scanning my face for disapproval. ‘Dee-vorced. He beat me up.’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good. I’m sure that’s a good idea.’ She smiles, and I see that all her teeth are false.

Her little boy is chasing my little boy, three steps forward, three steps back. He is extraordinarily good at it, extraordinarily interested in the younger child. The baby giggles: that pure, bubbling, rippling sound. We lean against a low wall, the Kosovan woman and I, relax in the early spring sun. She tells me her name: Antigona, four long syllables, with the stress on the ‘go’. I tell her mine. I have the feeling, at least in my memory, of strongly meeting someone, of making an important connection. And I have an idea.

‘Do you want a job?’ I say.

‘Are you sure that will be all right?’ says my husband, when I announce that someone for whom we have no references and whose second name we do not know will, for the foreseeable future, be working as our cleaner and be a keyholder in our household.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Honestly. She’s great. I trust her. It’s a woman thing. And we really need help in the house. We agreed.’

And when he raises his eyebrows, indicating that not only am I being irrational but probably – typically, self-destructively, sentimentally – am about to get over-involved, again (I once adopted a kitten with fleas, worms and leukaemia, and it was not me who administered the pills, nor took it on its final journey to the vet), I say:

‘Come on. She’s from Kosovo. She ran away from the Serbs. We have to trust her.’

I am calling on a mutual soft spot, an area of warm agreement we share not only with everyone we know, but with many people we usually disagree with, such as the voters of Middle America, and the leader writers of the Daily Mail. We know, we think, what Kosovo means: green hills, burnt-out villages, vast convoys of refugees on tractors. I remember that high-tech control room; NATO spokesman Jamie Shea dominating newscasts, telling us that perhaps 100,000 Albanians were in mass graves; Tony Blair receiving the adoration of camp-loads of refugees. We know what Kosovo was like: like Bosnia, wasn’t it? Dark-eyed Muslims from the Balkans, suffering, on mountains. But not as bad, because this time Blair and Clinton had started talking the kind of language we approved of, about individuals and ethics. This time we had helped, this time we had run the film back and done it differently. This time we had sent in the good soldiers – albeit all of them in aeroplanes, which concerned me at the time – before all the villages were torched, before the young men were herded like cattle to the killing field.

Even Mark, our builder – in this book I am nearly always doing up one or another early Victorian house in Hackney – is pro-Kosovar. His Polish father, dark skin, wide travels and warm intelligence do not usually prevent him from expressing the view that all refugees are Social Security scroungers out to take our jobs. But he makes an exception here, and not just because Antigona, on only her second day at work in my house, has hijacked the espresso-maker and made him a coffee with boiled milk and three sugars. ‘She’s from Kosovo, ain’t she?’ he says. ‘I don’t object to that. They had no choice, with them Serbs. They had to come here.’ And he looks over to Antigona with a most peculiar expression on his face: not lust exactly, more Madonnaworship. As if her dark hair and eyes, the spring in her step, the broom in her hand, recalled an ideal of the south and womanhood deeply imprinted on his English unconscious. It’s like a scene from Il Postino.

Though Antigona seems to take a lot of men that way. Even the lugubrious proprietor of the Italian delicatessen, the man with the vast gorgonzola neck who has never done more for me than sigh heavily over my choice of anti-pasti, has spotted us walking down the street, and asks me if I know her phone number, and offers me free apricot juice. ‘Is she Italian?’ he asks. ‘Sardinian?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Kosovo. Refugee.’ And watch that expression cross his face, the moue of surprise, the tender nod. ‘Albanian asylum-seeker’ would not, I think, have had the same effect.

‘How did she get here, then?’ says Mark. Midsummer. He is back for another job, and has found Antigona a fixture in the house, thoroughly comfortable with the cupboards, mistress of the washing machine. Mark approves. How she shifts, he says, how much better the whole place looks. He has already proposed marriage and been turned down. Antigona has nonetheless made him a coffee.

‘She carried her wounded daughter out of a burning village on her back,’ I say. And watch Mark’s eyes widen and soften. ‘Then she got in a lorry,’ I add, seizing the moment as I know that Mark has strong views on the misuse of lorries. It’s the plight of the lads driving that gets him. ‘Well,’ says Mark, gulping coffee, ‘of course. In the circumstances. You would. ’

I let him have the whole story, in fact, seeing as I have it. The day after I met Antigona in the street, I put a note through her door, asking her to come by. She came, rather dressed up, with both her teenage daughters and the little boy Ylli holding her hand. I offered tea, and made it, and nobody drank it. I felt awkward, but the girls curled up like cats on my new fluffy rug and petted my baby, covering him with kisses, making him walk with his little trolley. One was darker, taller, stronger, one very thin and pale; both had glossy hair and fringed eyes like colts. I had no idea which was older.

Meanwhile, Antigona cased the joint: walking up and down the stairs, checking my cleaning cupboard, the state of all the rooms. She spoke to her daughters. The darker one said, ‘I am Mihane. My mum will take the job. Eight pounds an hour. Four hours a week. But you will find her other jobs.’ I knew that would be easy, so I agreed. Then, almost as another item of business, Mihane told me, as she had clearly often told before, the outline of their escape from Kosovo. Antigona has added many details since, and Flora, the paler and, it turns out, older daughter has been round for some help with her homework and filled in her part. Flora’s poised, elegant English is really remarkable for someone who has only been in the country a year, but she clearly gets her storytelling ability from her mother. Both tell a tale with tremendous immediacy, a terrific mixture of detail and restraint, their slim arms shaking, their dark, liquid eyes apparently fixed on the scene.

The Serbs came for Antigona in March ’99. Four policemen, heavily armed, arrived looking for Fazli, Antigona’s husband – ex-husband, I teach her to say, since she is divorced, and she does, often, with relish – who they maintained had Kosovan Liberation Army information. Antigona said she hadn’t seen him for a long while, which was perfectly true, but the Serbs didn’t believe her. One policeman held Antigona, Mihane (ten), and Ylli (two) at gunpoint in the kitchen, and the others dragged Flora, who was just thirteen, onto the flat roof of the house.

The policemen called out to Fazli in the dark fields and terraces, the forest beyond, told him that they had his daughter and would drop her off the two-storeyed building. They told Flora to call out and she did, knowing all the time that her father was not there. Flora says she found herself thinking not so much of herself but of her baby brother. Ylli’s life – it is the family oath. Ylli, his soft round head and wondering eyes; Ylli on his mother’s lap; Ylli’s pretty plump hands reaching out to the barrel of a gun. They told her to scream and she found that quite easy. She screamed and screamed and Fazli did not come and after a while they threw her off the roof – one with her hands, one with her feet, like the bumps at a birthday party – and then they went home. They did not, on this occasion, shoot the baby.

Flora still carries the wound in her hip – the bone was cracked and is now slightly deformed and gives her a good deal of trouble. At the time, she could do nothing but lie on her side and breathe painfully. Antigona could get no medical help for her, not even painkillers. The village was paralysed, waiting. The Serbs came back a few nights later. The village trailed down a high valley, smallholding by smallholding; Antigona’s house was near the top. She saw the smoke billowing upwards from the bottom of the valley, and ran to wake the children. She took Flora on her back. Mihane carried Ylli. They ran through the door and did not look back. Antigona has never seen or heard of any of her husband’s family since that hour: the mother, brother and two sister-in-laws with whom she had been living cheek by jowl for fourteen years. They left everything behind: furniture, livestock, the ends of crops painfully harvested the previous autumn, seeds for the coming year, pots, pans, clothes. And a dog, Ylli says. A dog he really liked and who liked him.

They were in the forest all night. The next day they got to a neighbouring village where Antigona cashed in a favour and they got a lift higher up the mountains. From here, over many days, carrying Flora, getting lifts, sleeping in the woods, they reached Fazli’s cousin’s house near the Albanian border. Fazli had got on a boat to Puglia, they heard, but no one knew if he had landed. Weeks passed, months; no sign of Fazli, no money, not much to eat. Refugees trailed through the village on the road to Albania. Antigona could find out nothing of her own family, though she heard many stories of atrocities in their area. Maybe they had got out in time, over the hills into Macedonia; maybe not.

The cousin was kind, but Fazli was still missing and resources were limited. In the end, Antigona gave the cousin all her money and he took her somewhere she could get on a lorry. For three days, or perhaps longer – it was difficult to tell – they were rattled around in the back. It was very cold, so Antigona took off her coat and wrapped up the small Ylli between her knees. They had to keep shushing him. It was dark; it was a very long way. They slept.

Years later, during one of my son’s recurrent train fixations, Antigona was astonished to learn that a railway goes under the English Channel. As Sam prattled on about the many merits of the Eurostar, she said, dazed, ‘I thought we were on a train. When we were on the lorry. But I knew England was over the sea and I did not see how it could be.’

The lorry disgorges them at dawn just outside Graves-end. They stand in the road, and the tiny, round-eyed Ylli, then, as now, an enormously appealing child, sticks out a thumb. A car stops and a man looks them up and down. ‘Kosovo,’ says Antigona, and he motions them to get in. He drives them to the train station and buys tickets to Victoria, walks them to the platform, gives them a piece of paper with an address, and shows them which train to get on.

At Victoria they get off and look. Antigona makes several false starts, then grabs the arm of a middle-aged city gent, gesturing for directions to the address on the piece of paper. The gent thinks for a moment – he must have thought they were Roma, at first. ‘Kosovo,’ says Antigona again, indicating her little tableau of children, hollow-eyed under the Christmas lights. The gent puts them in a four-square London taxi, and gives the driver a twenty-pound note. The piece of paper turns out to be the address of our local church, where our lefty vicar has turned most of his crumbling Gothic pile into a refugee centre. Kind people take the little family to Social Services, where the children fall asleep on the delightfully warm carpet. Antigona tells her story, desperate, animated and compelling. Flora fills in with the Serbs and the roof. Ylli raises his big eyes to the social workers and gives his beautiful smile. Of course, they get asylum. Even Mark, who, when I get to this point in the story, has his head down and is mopping his face with his bandana, would have given them asylum.

Antigona retells the end of the story every year, at Christmas time. Social Services assign them a room and give them some money and a church person takes Antigona to Tesco, where she is deeply impressed by the range of unseasonal produce. The next day, the family wakes up warm, safe, fed. It is Christmas morning, the traffic is hushed, and the frosty air is saturated with bells: the bells of the buried London villages, sounding out the parish boundaries. Oranges and Lemons; the Old Bailey calling in her debts; Shoreditch and Stepney still hoping to grow rich, all these centuries on. Antigona and her family gaze out of the window at families slithering down the pavements, waving their new hats and gloves, taking the Christmas bike for a spin. ‘I did feel really grateful,’ says Antigona. ‘Really glad of this country.’

After I have known Antigona perhaps six weeks, she tells me a story for herself. It comes to me slowly, through her halting English and my suggestions, like a film run too slowly, frame by crackling frame.

Antigona is cleaning the kitchen and I am playing with the baby. Again, she wonders at the child’s golden hair. Sam won’t grow up blond, I say, not when I’m so dark; just look at his eyelashes. I love his eyelashes, dark as mascara, the very length and curve of a Disney creature’s.

Antigona wipes the stove. She says I must stop rejoicing in the baby’s eyelashes or I will invoke the envy of neighbours, which will in turn bring down the power of the Bad Eye. The Evil Eye? I say, remembering an amulet I had as a child, a coral horn on a charm bracelet. Yes.

Antigona’s own younger sister was blonde, she says. And not just in Sam’s tow-headed way, either, nor as Ylli, she maintains, was once light-haired. No. Antigona’s younger sister had blue eyes, which is vanishingly rare in Kosovo and much, much to be admired. Also her blonde hair curled. Also she is dead.

And this is how she died. Antigona’s mother, who had by then five children, fell terribly ill. She was a valuable person in the family because she looked after not only all of them but also the family smallholding, so Antigona’s aunts, her mother’s sisters, decided to save her. They went to – the Imam? Not exactly. More like the magic man, but he is definitely using the Koran and he is definitely, definitely real, true: he has magic. The Magic Man says that Antigona’s mother is under a curse and must die. The aunts must buy magic papers.

‘Do you believe that?’ I ask.

I don’t. I don’t believe this. This does not belong in my world, this glimpse under the flap of an Ottoman tent, this pile of rugs, this magic-dealing holy man. It is as if I had opened one of my nice Ikea cabinets and discovered a freshly sacrificed goat. Antigona is my contemporary, she is from Europe, and I want her, at this point, to tell me of course this is a con trick, a load of hooey.

But no. She is adamant. The magic papers were real, were true, were magic. I should watch out for curses, they are everywhere. The Magic Man wrote the magic sentence down on paper, and folded the paper, and gave it to the aunties, like an amulet, and that was how the magic started. The rule of the magic papers was: they would let one person back across Lethe, but only if another body were given in exchange. The only way to save Antigona’s mother was to sacrifice another member of the family. The aunts nominated the blonde baby, and put the papers in her cot, and, within days, the baby, who had been perfectly healthy, died, and the mother recovered. Antigona remembers it well.

She didn’t know about the papers and the magic exchange, though, until she was thirty and her aunt came to visit and told her that it had been a near thing between the baby and Antigona. The blonde curls had been narrowly outweighed by Antigona’s already evident sprightly health and capacity for work. A mistake, of course. Had they known that Antigona would marry Fazli and be beaten up so very regularly, they’d definitely have chosen her. It would have been a blessing to her.

I begin to understand what this story is about. It is not a horror story, though I am horrified: it is about the worth of Antigona’s life. It is another version of ‘I am dee-vorced, dee-vorced,’ and the out-held bare hand.

‘What did you say to that?’ I ask, gently now.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ says Antigona, ‘because my aunty didn’t know I was going to come here and have my life here.’

‘Your life here is hard.’

‘No. You don’t know, Kate, the difference my life there and my life here. There I was like a dog. I borrowed money for bread. Here – I can work. I can do anything. I can choose my life.’

‘So you were the right one to save?’

‘Yeah. Now I am the lucky one.’ And Antigona thinks some more about her aunty.

‘Bitch,’ says Antigona thoughtfully, polishing the stove top to a sheen. Her English is coming along in leaps and bounds.

2

Highlanders

Things Antigona Knows How to Do and I Don’t: No. 1

MOPPING (APPARENTLY)

I do mop, just not very often and with a squeegee. The first time she comes to my house, as a condition of taking the job, Antigona says I must go out and buy a cotton mop and mop bucket, so I do.

The first day she comes to work for me, she hauls all the chairs on top of the kitchen table. She drags the rugs out to the garden and beats them on the line with a broom handle. She vacuums the entire floor for a full twenty minutes. Then she mops, squeezing the cotton mop till it is almost dry, pressing and lifting all the dirt off the floor. The lino shines, and she turns to me and smiles.

She smells of sweat. I don’t. Her eyes gleam with triumph.

‘I’m strong,’ she says. ‘You are not.’

Things I Know How to Do and Antigona Doesn’t: No. 1

Write to the Council, once a week, with a list of the faults in Antigona’s hostel, enclosing photos, doctors’ notes and taped-on mouse droppings, until the accommodation is changed. In the new place, get all the basic services working by phoning up lots of call centres from my landline. Use my credit card to get the electricity charged to a meter instead of the cruelly expensive ‘key’ system. Write letters to the Council pointing out that Antigona is entitled to Single Person’s Allowance on her Council Tax. Phone up the Council serially, over a number of days, until I get hold of the right official capable of actually registering this change on the computer. Reply to cryptic missives from the Home Office, getting all the reference numbers in the right places.

I know how to, so I do. I become Antigona’s chief employer, scribe and confidante and this happens rapidly, within three months. I make all the running: it becomes one of my projects. Why are you doing all that, says my husband, isn’t it taking a lot of Your Time. Because, since we had the baby, I am always banging on about My Time, and how I have none any more, and taking on a cleaner was supposed to make some extra. I invent some answers.

I am doing this because: living where I live, I am often confronted with the barriers language puts in front of immigrants, often see small and large humiliations visited on people all too aware of what is happening to them. Every refugee, I think, even a fluent English speaker, even one with an advanced degree, needs an amanuensis. Language and letters are easy for me, and I had been vaguely intending to volunteer to take English classes, or for Citizen’s Advice, but never got round to it: so helping Antigona saves me the trouble.

I am doing this because: Antigona is a fantastic cleaner, hasn’t he noticed? She has energy, she has initiative, she is not frightened to delve to the bottom of the wash heap, or to tackle the no-go area under the stairs. Our house is orderly now, clean; it has a rhythm of tidying and straightening. She saves loads of My Time – not just the four hours per week cleaning, but the numberless hours I previously spent staring at the cleaning and feeling bad about it.

I am doing this because: I like Antigona. She is vigorous, she is illuminating, she is funny. Her causes are my sort of causes. I wouldn’t do it, for example, for her husband.

Mostly, though, I am doing this because: having someone clean my house makes me feel powerfully guilty and obliged. When I am typing upstairs, ‘working’ on something as small and commercially insignificant as a poem, and Antigona is cleaning downstairs, each bang of the broom makes me blush. I shut the door, but even then I find myself hopping about the room, chewing my fingers. I seek out journalism to do on Antigona’s days, because a short deadline and swift cheque make me feel more useful. To be honest, the letters seem a small undertaking, compared to the mopping. If we do it this way, if I spend at least half an hour of her four hours discussing her life over one of her coffees, I can manage to have her in my house without doing something irrational, such as crying, and begging for another go with the mop.

There were staging posts, though, to intimacy.

Just a couple of weeks after we met, there was the crisis of the sweet factory. Antigona had a job there, on the production line. She told me that the sweet factory man wanted her papers, her numbers; and I, with visions of sweatshops and gangmasters, told her to quit at once. Yes, she said, but I must then find her more cleaning jobs. She was already fixed up with some of my friends, but I said a notice in the Deli was the thing, and I wrote her one, quoting my phone number and reference, and within days she was fully booked.

Then there were various incidents with Fazli, the Ex-Husband. Antigona had thrown him out months before she met me; her divorce was almost complete, but he was still very much in the country: following her from job to job, leering at her outfits, racing her to Ylli’s school to pick the child up and insult the teachers, menacing the girls at bus stops, driving around her house at night in a stolen car – so many things I have forgotten the order of them. I remember teaching her to ask for the right police officer on the phone, though, and to say, ‘Hello, I am calling to log another incident,’ and peering out of the window to see if he was there – he was, once – and walking her back up the road to her house. ‘Like EastEnders for you, innit,’ she said one day, and she was right: I liked the drama.

I liked the raw politics of it, too. Her papers, for instance. When Antigona first arrived here, in 1999, she got a year’s Exceptional Leave to Remain. As it ran out, she applied for more. The process was rather slow, and was still going on when I met her in 2001. In the autumn, it was reaching a crisis, and we went over her case together. Her lawyer was saying that not only was Kosovo still dangerous, but it was an impossible place for a divorced woman: neat feminism, just what interests me most.