Ruins of Autumn

46• The Whole Truth

    Anila closed the door and turned to Visara.
 
    "I am not doing anything illegal," she explained instantly.
 
    "I want the whole truth," Anila demanded.
 
    "Okay, let's sit down."
 
    Visara sat first at the head of her bed with a forest green blanket, and Anila sat in front of her.
 
    "I'm dating someone," she confessed excitedly.
 
    "Since when?"
 
    Visara bit her teeth on her lower lip, feeling herself in trouble. "It became one year in July."
 
    Anila was about to yell all the questions that formed at once, but she didn't make a sound.
 
    "I was going to tell you, but you didn't seem in the mood to listen, and I was afraid that you would ask me not to meet him again because he could be playing, but he's not playing," Visara emphasised in the last part of the sentence. "I have understood that he really loves me. He even told me that he wants to meet you and get to know my family."
 
    "Do you know his family?"
 
    "No, I haven't met them yet. There are his parents in the basic family, an older brother, and two younger sisters. He is twenty-five years old and works as a programmer for a private company in Tirana."
 
    "Where is he from?"
 
    "... Durrës."
 
    Anila immediately looked up in disapproval.
 
    "But you will like him a lot as a person," Visara insisted. "He's very educated and obsessed with applying the rules of ethics like you are."
 
    "He wants to meet me?"
 
    "Yes."
 
    "What's his name?"
 
    "Daniel Hidri." Visara was looking impatiently at Anila for her to answer.
 
    "Okay, ask him to meet us," Anila agreed.
 
    "When?"
 
    "Within this week."
 
    "What if he says about today?"
 
    "Accept."
 
    Visara took the phone from the bed and texted her boyfriend.
 
    " 'Today', he says." She told her after three minutes.
 
    "Fine. Pick a place, and let's go." Anila stood up and left the room.
 
    Maybe he really loved Visara, but Anila felt it was her duty to tell him that if he dared to make even the smallest mistake against her, there would be no forgiveness for him. She had sacrificed a lot for that girl. One of the reasons she hadn't reported Blerimi to the police was the fear that she would pay for it with Visara. When she hadn't spared herself for her sister, she didn't care about anyone else.
 
    She paired the black jeans with a black shirt and trainers as well. She parted her hair in the middle and let it loose so that, if she cried, she could cover her face with it.
 
    Visara tied her hair in a bun on top of her head and wore a short apricot to light pink dress with sides and short sleeves, white roses and a ribbon around her waist, and teal heels.
 
    "Don't look at him, as if you want to kill him," she asked Anila while they were waiting for him at the entrance of a bar.
 
    "Why, what happens to him? Does he faint from fear?"
 
    "Ania." Visara warned tiredly. "See? This is why I hesitated to tell you about him. You speak as if you are deliberately provoking others to start a fight, only to argue with them afterward."
 
    Anila let out a sigh of annoyance and tried not to create negative thoughts about how that meeting would go, fearing that she wouldn't do something that would make Visara look bad in front of him and turn her sister against herself.
 
    "He's here." Visara looked wholeheartedly behind Anila, and the latter turned her head back.
 
    She guessed that Danieli was the man wearing pale blue jeans, a tile-coloured shirt, and white trainers who showed some reluctance when he met her gaze.
 
    She stared into his cobalt eyes, glanced at the slightly long, dark yellow hair that was pushed on his head, and then looked back at his eyes.
 
    "How are you?" He first extended his hand to Anila, obviously feeling like he was walking on thorns from the thought that she was creating about him.
 
    "Fine," she answered in a formal tone.
 
    "And you?" Danieli turned to his girlfriend.
 
    "Very well," she laughed, unable to contain her emotions any longer without expressing them.
 
    "Shall we go to the bar?" he asked for Anila's approval.
 
    "Yes." Anila entered first and led them to a circular wooden table.
 
    She sat down on the dark red sofa by the glass wall of the bar, while the two of them sat in front of her, and they ordered the drinks.
 
    "If you wish, we can meet another time, Ania," he said. "It looks like you're not in the mood. I won't take it personally."
 
    "I'm fine, thanks. How are you doing? Work? Family?"
 
    "Work is going very well. As Visara has told you, I am a programmer. I work and live in Tirana. My family is in Durrës. A part of my family." He glanced at Visara, and they both understood what he had wanted to say.
 
    Anila looked at the main door to give them a moment to look at each other, and her eyes remained fixed on the entrance when she saw Sidorel Nura enter with three other men.
 
    She stared, without batting her eyelids, at his heavy and serious gaze on the surrounding environment and forthwith turned her head to Danieli and Visara when he looked at her, and it seemed to Anila that his gaze became more serious.
 
    "You have two sisters and a brother, Visara told me." Anila started to get out of breath.
 
    She looked at Sidoreli, who was wearing a teal T-shirt, blue jeans, and black trainers, as if casually, and noticed that he was smiling as he passed by her table with his friends.
 
    She wasn't sure if she liked the coincidence of being in the same environment with him, because it was unpredicted, and Anila had always enjoyed such events that had a positive effect on her; she would have felt that way even if she had happened to be in the same place with someone else she knew, or because Sidoreli was part of that coincidence. It was because of him that Anila felt a good impression of the flow that the day was getting.
 
    "Yes," Danieli answered. "My brother is two years older than me, and my sisters are younger. Jorida is twenty years old; Melisa is eighteen."
 
    "I'm guessing, you know, that our brother has passed away, and his killer hasn't been found yet."
 
    He and Visara saw her, frozen by the suddenly spoken words like the rush of icy water from a waterfall.
 
    "You didn't know?" Anila looked reproachfully at Visara, whose face colour had gone, and from her confused look, it seemed as if she was wishing that her sister had never met Danieli.
 
    "I know," he answered. "Visara has told me."
 
    Anila waited for a more detailed explanation.
 
    "I only see God as an obstacle to not being with Visara if He has decided something else for us, myself, if I don't love Visara, and your sister, if she doesn't love me." Danieli continued.
 
    Sidoreli sat a few tables away in the chair facing Anila.
 
    "Now, since I am meeting a family member of Visara, her sister, who is considered a second mother, I believe it is clear that she loves me."
 
    "Excuse me," Visara got up from the table.
 
    "Are you okay?" Danieli asked worriedly, noticing that she was about to cry.
 
    Visara put her hand out so that he wouldn't insist any longer and glared at Anila before heading towards the toilet.
 
    "She cries about Amarildo," Anila explicated neutrally as if she were annoyed by such an action, and Danieli looked at her, remembering Visara's words about her and how much she had changed after Amarildo's death, and expressed the pain of his loss by behaving bitterly with others.
 
    "Look, Ania." Danieli found the opportunity to finally speak openly. "I have younger sisters myself, and I know very well how protective you are of Visara. If one of my sisters told me that she was dating someone, the first thing I would think of would be to beat that person because he has dared to look at my sister; it's another topic, whether he wanted to play with her or not. Even if he was serious, I would still have beaten him as a warning of what awaits him if he hurts my sister. I didn't have a problem meeting you before, but I just waited for Visara to have the same goals. I'm very serious about her. That's why I met her friends before meeting you. I didn't want to alarm her, telling her that I wanted to get to know her family, because maybe she wasn't as serious as I was, but now I know that she is."
 
    Anila searched for reasons to suspect that he was faking, but in his honest gaze, she found none.
 
    "Since you said yourself that you're serious, then you will have no excuse in front of me if you do the opposite," Anila warned him. "I'm not one of those people who say that life is given by God and only God can take it away, and then they ignore the suffering of the innocent and forgive the guilty people. For me, freedom is as important as life. Only God has the right to take freedom from someone. If I hear that you dared to take my sister's freedom to live a happy life by upsetting her unfairly, don't expect forgiveness. The only solution for me to live will be your death, and I will stop at nothing to succeed." Anila tried to hide the astonishing fear behind the dark and her threatening look that Danieli knew about her video, and from moment to moment, he would burst out laughing at her brave behaviour.
 
    'You have been lied to and recorded. You come here to talk about morality to me?' She was waiting to hear from him. 'If you had loved your sister as much as you say, you wouldn't have gotten into someone's bed and disgraced your whole family because you wanted to be touched for one night.'
 
    "We're cool, then," Danieli said.
 
    Sidoreli saw that Anila softened her gaze towards the stranger and pursed her lips in a light smile, calmer than she had looked in agony before. He kept his stare unbroken on her eyes, as if to understand whether it had been them who had caused him the feeling of liking Anila's beauty, her presence, and talking to her.
 
    He glanced at the man sitting at the table with her a little while ago, who got up and left, overcome by the desire to talk to Anila.
 
    And maybe the lady needed help. What if she was in an uncomfortable situation next to that stranger and was waiting for someone to notice and save her? Shouldn't Sidoreli fulfil the role of a righteous citizen?
 
    He got up from the table and walked over to the end of the bar and the couch where she was sitting.
 
    Anila glimpsed at him only for a moment and promptly turned her head away to stare at her desk. She followed, without moving, the low sound of his steps as Sidoreli approached her, and she held her breath when she felt the latter stop behind her back.