HERE, THERE, OR ANYWHERE ELSE — GENTA NISHKU
/Despite the country’s diverse topography, regional buses always make pit stops at restaurants that look and feel the same. The same orange and white plastic chairs, an oval hole where one’s back would rest. The same white plastic tables, with the same white paper covers, adorned with a pattern of pink flowers on each edge. The same ceiling fan, moving slowly above the magazine stand, repurposed to hold salty and sweet snacks, wrapped in more shiny plastic. The same bathrooms without toilet paper or running water. The same wooden decorations, portraits of national heroes or paintings of a village alleyway, somewhere nondescript. The same embalmed eagles mounted on the walls, responsible for the bird’s fast disappearance from the region. Next to these, an instrument or two, never once played. The menus are the same, too. Same drinks: short or long espresso, long or short macchiato, Turkish coffee, lemon soda, tonic water, sparkling water, coke, cheap beer. Same food: rice pilaf, with or without gravy, bean stew, fillets of pork or chicken breasts, eggs scrambled with bell peppers, tomatoes and farmer’s cheese, green salad, greek salad, village salad, pickled cabbage. Even the waiters serving the wary commuters are the same: scrawny young boys, related to the owners of the restaurants, or the owners themselves, middle-aged men with protruding guts and gold chains, permanently tanned by years of harsh sun. The local clientele is almost always groups of men, gathered around empty glasses and plastic bottles, plates of bones, unnamed dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The passengers on the bus change up the scene at the restaurant when they arrive, every hour or so, but even they are predictable: old women traveling alone because of family or health problems, waiting to be picked up by a son or nephew at one of the stops, students traveling home or back to the city where they study, textbooks in tow, families with young children who misbehave and demand chips and soda, new couples holding hands, the solitary woman or two, staring at her phone. They disembark the buses and fill the empty tables and chairs, look to the view that unfolds in front of them at each of these stops: a meadow, or a lake, cows grazing, or a few ducks moving leisurely. The landscape is interrupted by the building that holds the restaurant, incongruous with its surroundings, the parking lot that extends too far, the gas station across the street, owned by one of two companies, excavators and gravel trucks a bit further in the distance, newly constructed hotels in the middle of nowhere, the skeletons of houses left unfinished, landscape without imagination but full of disappointment, everything the same, saying: long live democracy, long live freedom.
Genta Nishku lives in New York and grew up in Tirana.
