Where Women Live as Men

This is a social vignette describing an accepted cultural offshoot of an originally primitive life way where women were chattel and the way of the burrneshas provided a rational escape and practical solution to problems of inheritance as well.

It also opens a window on the mythos of the Amazons.  In a barbaric warrior culture, the same forces would naturally throw up Amazon warriors who would form a natural war band in a barbaric tribe and thus be remembered as such although never in great numbers.

Reading this, one does feel closer to understanding Celtic women warriors and Amazon warriors who deliberately removed breasts in order to practice archery.  The potential was always there and this maps the necessary adjustments that allow it to be so.

The Mountains Where Women Live as Men

It began hundreds of years ago, deep in the Albanian Alps—an unusual tradition where women, with limited options in life, took the oath of the burrnesha. A pledge to live as a man. To dress like a man, to work like a man, to assume the burdens and the liberties of a man. But these freedoms came with a price: The burrneshasalso made a pledge of lifelong celibacy. Today these sworn virgins live on, but their numbers have dwindled. Many Albanians don't even know they exist. What happens when the society that created you no longer needs you? And how do you live in the meantime?

BY MICHAEL PATERNITI

March 2014

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201403/burrnesha-albanian-women-living-as-men

They arrived linked in an e-mail from a friend, with a tagline that read: Amazing. They were color portraits, shot recently, seemingly of old men who'd lived a little. At least that's what the evidence suggested: They were dressed as old men, and the camera seemed to regard them as old men, if from another time, like the '40s or '50s. But there was something in the eyes, and sometimes the hands, even the carriage of bones—a softness that made me wonder.

The more I gazed upon the photographs, the more I noticed something else. In image after image, the faces possessed an otherworldly quality. That's as close as I can come to it: Their eyes seemed to look steadily, unabashedly at the camera—or up at the sky, as if they might float away.

These were burrneshas, the text read, or women who dressed and lived as men, in isolated regions of northern Albania, a land of ultraconservative mores. There were strict rules and reasons for this transformation, ones that had been established some 500 years earlier, as part of a medieval canon of laws known as the Kanun. Today possibly only a few dozen burrneshas still exist—and the tribe is fast dwindling.

In the pictures, the burrneshas posed and gazed dreamily, disappeared behind clouds of cigarette smoke or sat erect in a chair, surrounded by family, smiling beneficently. Their vulnerability seemed a strength. And it occurred to me that perhaps I was looking upon the rarest thing of all, complete actualization. Or transcendence. If so, how had they pulled it off?

I stared at the photographs for so long, pondering these questions, that I lost track of time. Until I heard a cow moo. And then, standing before me was Haki.

It was a mild November afternoon, and Haki stood in the bright light of his garden, smoking like the Penguin, with a cane and a cigarette holder, the embers of his Karelia butt burning angrily. He wore a leather jacket, slacks hiked high, and a plaid shirt. He possessed a gray mop of hair, and his eyes resembled those of Charles Bronson. Even though he was 71 years old, he seemed boyish and lithe, if a little humped. Uncurled, he still would have stood only five feet tall.

Haki's house was made of stone, as was the barn with the calf inside, all set in a lost valley. There was no straight road to reach this place. So along with my translator—a husky bear of a young man named Ermal, who, though a fine navigator, drove with all the subtlety of Beethoven's Ninth—I'd traveled north on Albania's recently completed highway from the capital of Tirana into Kosovo, where we were stopped at a midnight checkpoint by bored soldiers bearing AK-47's, then looped back into a northerly, mountainous pocket of Albania.

As it turned out, it was damn hard to find these burrneshas. We'd driven up switchbacks and down dirt tracks.

"What is it?" Ermal had demanded. "You're disappointed?" He'd proven to be an intuitive companion.

"It's like searching for unicorns," I'd said.

"Yes," he'd said, accelerating until he almost rammed a car in front of us, then jammed the brake. "Butburrneshas are real," he'd said, our heads whiplashing in unison, "and unicorns are not."

Now here was the real thing himself, spitting venom. Other journalists had visited Haki in the past, sometimes asking questions that he viewed as impertinent. A number had wanted to know if he was really just a lesbian in disguise—and this had triggered a deep hurt.

"It breaks my heart that anyone would ask such questions," he said, picking a tobacco leaf from the tip of his tongue. "I hate to be used. God has given me what I am, and I've made do. Being lesbian—this isn't even what being a burrnesha is about.

"Don't confuse who I am with being a lesbian," he said, "or I'll kick you in the shins."

The word burrnesha translates as "he-she." And like most burrneshas, Haki was a virgin who had taken a vow of celibacy that elevated him to a time-honored position in the community, the in-between person. The origins of the tradition weren't clear, but historically, when the male heirs of a family died or had been killed and property could no longer be passed in patrilineal fashion, an allowance was made: If a virgin daughter remained, she could assume the role of patriarch by swearing in front of a dozen village elders that she would remain celibate for the rest of her life. By this declaration, the burrnesha secured the family estate—and honor. It was, as one observer told me, "a choice of force, not happiness," a social construct and selfless act to protect the family.

Haki's case was a little different. He'd almost been born to his burrnesha-hood. His parents had thirteen children, he said, and he came third in line. When his mother was pregnant with him, an old traveling dervish from Kosovo had passed through the village, and knowing his head was being sought in a blood feud, he asked for a plot on the family land to be buried in. Haki's father consented, as a good Albanian and Muslim. And before the dervish was killed eleven days later, he predicted that Haki, while born female, would live like a male. And that's exactly what happened.

Haki had mastered the gestures and stance of manhood until all of it was muscle memory, or rather, just who he was. He spit and smoked and milked the cows, just as he put each leg through his pants in the morning. He cursed, then acted as he pleased, living here entirely alone as he did, collecting honey from his bees. Some burrneshas had such a flexible sense of their gender that you might refer to them as a he or a she, or use the pronouns interchangeably. Not Haki.

Even if one's life as a burrnesha wasn't foretold as Haki's had been, or if male heirs were still alive, there were other reasons why a girl in Albania might want to become a boy, or a woman a man. Imagine, as when Haki was young, marrying at the age of 15, 16, 17 years old, conceivably to a husband who might be 40, 50, 60. On your wedding night, your father might slip a bullet into your suitcase, for your husband's use in case you're not a virgin. You will stand throughout your wedding, eyes downcast as the humble, heeled animal you've just become, and soon you will live with your husband's family, wherever they may live, in virtual enslavement, taking all of your orders from them. You will never talk back. You will make no decision, even when it comes to the children to whom you give birth. You will not smoke or drink or shoot a gun. From sunup to sundown, your life will be full of hard labor. According to the Kanun: "A woman is known as a sack made to endure as long as she lives in her husband's house."

Haki sat on a bench beneath a peach tree in his light-filled garden, inhaling cigarette after cigarette in its holder, squinting behind clouds of smoke. The bees made their honey, and he could barely contain his belligerence, though he tried as best he could at brief politeness, given that the Kanun also stresses the importance of hospitality. But then, why would he leave the depiction of his life to the report of yet another stranger, one who could never understand the cost of his journey? He wasn't a clown or a freak or an entertainer. All he wanted in the end was his absolute freedom, which in this country was the most precious metal of all.

Albania is located sixty miles across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. It borders Montenegro and Kosovo to the north, Macedonia to the east, and Greece to the south. If you know nothing about "the Land of the Eagles," relax. You're not alone. Albanians love topiary and fancy doors. They speak Albanian, an Indo-European language with traces of Greek and Latin—and the lek is their monetary denomination, which trades at one hundred to one on the dollar. Their food is excellent, a mélange of Greek, Turkish, and Italian cuisine, all very fresh and legume-y. Mother Teresa was Albanian, as was John Belushi's father. Albanians today adore Frank Sinatra songs, midcentury San Francisco (though not the Sodom they say it's become), and George W. Bush, who once spent eight hours in the country. (They love our former presidents because, as one Albanian told me, they have "big, man-sized balls," and with NATO, they sent the jets that decimated the Serbians during the Balkan conflict.)

There are other important facts: Albanians shake their head "no" when they mean "yes," and "yes" for "no," which can really confuse a visitor, especially when drunk or engaged in heated debate. They tap their heart to show ultimate respect for you, but when driving, they will attempt to crush you. The country is riddled with pocked, at times impassable roads, so that one seems to bounce up and down as much as go forward here—which makes the daily Grand Prix all the more stomach-churning. Meanwhile, Albanian society is distinctly conservative, made up of 30 percent Christians and 70 percent Muslims, with a historical disregard for women's rights, among others'. In response to the first gay-pride parade held in Tirana this past spring, Ekrem Spahiu, the deputy minister of defense, was quoted as saying of the celebrants: "What remains to be done is to beat them up with a stick. If you don't understand this, I can explain it: to beat them with a rubber stick."

This, of course, is the sort of machismo that can be sulfurous, and Albania is one of the most macho places I've been, rubber stick aside. People are quick to glare rather than smile. And in part because of this centuries-old defensive crouch—this constant game of hair-trigger chicken—the northern part of the country is notorious for a plethora of blood feuds. Even today, it's estimated that 20,000 Albanians spend their days in hiding from blood feuds, rarely leaving their homes or apartments, skipping school, fleeing the country, or gathering in towers called kulla in preparation for imminent attack.

According to Ermal, it doesn't help that his Albanian brethren are "oversensitive and hot-blooded," especially after fender benders, of which there are many on the crappy roads. Some angry words, a few gunshots, and the next thing you know, you're holed up in Grandma's city apartment for five years, trying not to get killed by retribution.

Meanwhile, on the subject of the burrneshas, most people in Tirana have never heard of them or believe them to be entirely mythical. Like elves. Ermal was one of those, shaking his head yes or no as he learned more about them, with a blank affect. What did he make of it all?

As it was, varying accounts existed of how many burrneshas might still be alive. A dozen? Double? Anthropologist Antonia Young, who's studied the burrneshas for twenty-five years, says there may be up to a hundred, but likely fewer. A small northern village was, until recently, home to five old ones. But then, as time has marched on and the burrneshas have begun dying off, they really have become more rumor than reality, the flickering phantom right around this corner, up this path, in this house over here, vanishing before our eyes, taking their stories to the grave.

···

On another day in the north, another mountain to climb. When the switchbacks ceased and we came to the end of the road, we found Lume (pronounced loom-eh) in the shadow of the limestone escarpments, dressed head to heel in fatigues, including an army cap. She was perched on a compact mountain horse with a crude wooden saddle that looked as if it might prove somewhat painful. She—for that's how she identified, not insisting on "he" but accepting it equally when used—was the rarest burrnesha of all because of her age: 42 years old but looking about 18, compact and muscly herself, with flipped-up jet-black hair, wearing funky wrestling shoes. (The whole outfit, she proudly declared, was bought in Kosovo for less than twenty bucks.) She didn't make eye contact at first, hiding herself in the shadow of her cap. But when it came off eventually, her irises were an arresting green.

She led us to her house, a compound set down on a slope behind an elaborate branch fence. Lume was the fifth of four brothers and two sisters, all of them alive, and one of her brothers lived here, too. He was in the process of building a new house while Lume's mother shared Lume's house with her. Lume's sister-in-law crossed the little courtyard when we came in, her arms hugging an oversize load of dried stalks. She wore a scarf over her head and a toothless smile; the back of her hands were tanned and dirty, dry skin cracking. She could have been anywhere between the ages of 35 and 65.

Everyone was busy here, getting ready for winter, which you could begin to feel in the shadows and at nightfall, as the temperatures began to plummet. The snow, when it landed, could last until August, so it was important to have all your firewood cut and stacked. It was important to have food in storage—and food for the animals, too. It was important that everything was mended and fixed before the weight of all that sky fell. Even to fetch the water was a treacherous slide down the ravine to the stream that cut the mountain.

As northern Albania rapidly entered the modern world, it wasn't as if there were a new generation of burrneshas coming up behind Lume. And yet the dubious distinction of perhaps being the last didn't matter one way or the other to her. She said the transition from girl to boy had never been an issue, at least in her own mind. She would never be kept by a man, anyway: "I don't know what a dress is and will never know!" she said.

When young, she'd clothed herself in boy garb. "God is always looking after us," Lume said, after showing us into her house and offering us a couch in the living room. Her sister-in-law shuttled in tea and soda as Lume sat, her elbows propped on either knee. "When I was about 12, I said, ‘Please God, help me. I pray to be a burrnesha until the end.’ " Then she talked to her baba—or father—and he understood. He gathered Lume's four brothers and, according to Lume, told them, "Herewith forward, this girl is a sworn virgin and will live like a man. These will be her affairs. You worry only for yours." And the brothers became angry and asked why. Why, if none of the men in the family were dead, did they need a fifth brother?

They kept on, vociferously: Lume should marry, they insisted. She was going to make them all look foolish—the time for sworn virgins was over.

"Who's going to take care of you?" they asked Lume, and she was defiant. It was as if she were getting married—to the him in her, or the he in she—to a powerful idea that gave him-her strength and agency. Over time, after the father died and each brother moved from the house, she was left with her mother. She rode her horse, chopped wood. She might walk to Tropojë and back, an eight-hour round-trip. When she cut herself with a knife, she put tobacco on the wound, a little sugar, too, and took her belt and cinched it around her arm. Then she started down the mountain to find a doctor. On another occasion, when she was in town drinking with some men, one of the young ones asked her to join him at a hotel, and she pulled out that same knife and stuck it in him.

Now Lume took us out into the afternoon, to a little field above the house. She walked like a wrestler, with wiry confidence. She held herself that way, too, her hands occasionally making fists, then releasing. There were scars on her fingers. Pointing to the sheer pale-orange limestone cliffs looming above us, she said that one of her favorite things to do was pack a little picnic—bread; cheese; some raki, the forty-proof spirit that was the national drink—and hike up there and shoot at rabbits and pigs. "I've never gotten a pig," she said, "but I'd like to." When I asked who joined her on those excursions, she said, without hesitation, "Just me."

The light didn't last long in Lume's ravine. It was as if someone had pulled a purple-gray curtain over everything, and we were back inside the compound—Lume's sister-in-law toting another heavy load of branches, Lume lifting the heavy saddle off her horse—when her brother appeared at twilight. His face sunburned, a few teeth missing, too, he'd spent the day up on the mountain, lounging, having a picnic with friends. Listing to the right, he smelled of lighter fluid, tobacco, and manure, and warmly greeted almost everyone. Except his sister. They didn't make eye contact, and one could almost have cut a finger on that edge between them.

For the first time, Lume seemed to shrink a little, her hands fluttering and landing in the pockets of her fatigues, hidden. She didn't speak a word, looked away. Her mother came back from somewhere, a handsome woman with curly gray hair and a striking countenance. You could tell where Lume got her looks. And there she stood, in between her mother and brother, her face disappearing into the shadows beneath the bill of her cap. In that fleeting moment, her fatigues created the optical illusion of a body fading into the trees, and it was unclear who she might be anymore.

Or if she was there at all.

While basic, our hotel in Tropojë fully met my rigid USSR-meets-The Jetsons decor standards. Even the rainbow sheets were perfect. And the man who parked the cars in the alley looked exactly like that great Albanian hero—and no, ha-ha, I'm not talking about King Zog, survivor of fifty-five assassination attempts, but George W. Bush. In fact, locals called our car-parking concierge "George Bushie." And he always responded with a huge smile, which was highly unusual in this otherwise grim place. But he really did look like George Bushie. And he was the smiliest guy in all of Albania because of it.

The morning after seeing Lume, I found myself in the hotel café, observing a room full of grumpy-looking men in dark overcoats, eyeing one another suspiciously. The patriarchs of the town truly dominated the lazy if paranoid killing of daytime hours, sucking nicotine and caffeine.

Sitting there, stirring sugar into my café au lait—what kind of ball-less man drinks suede-colored coffee?—I was thinking about my coffee shop back home and how, on any given day, you might take for granted the egalitarian flow, the mash-up of gender stereotypes: a woman dressed in untied high-tops and a baggy hoodie; a dude chatting up the barista while wearing a kilt; a hetero couple in matching scarves, talking about olive oil. What did all this mean? Nothing—hopefully. Unless you needed it to. Unless you were to move the coffee shop to certain parts of Wyoming—or Albania.

"You Americans know too much freedom," Ermal had said bluntly while driving out of town again, on the lush plain that would bring us to another burrnesha, named Hajdari. Ermal was a peach of a guy who'd recently found Jesus, our Lord and Savior—and always seemed to have an eye peeled for clean bathrooms along the road, just in case there was a need. More than once, he'd returned to the car, emphatically shaking his head yes, which meant no. "Not suitable for a heavy duty," he'd say, waving off the facilities. Now he asked if I believed in gay marriage, but before I could answer, he stated his unequivocal opposition.

"My wife is my best friend," he said, and then: "Humans need rules and boundaries."

Hajdari, who was 86, lived on a well-kept farm, and we found him seated there on a couch in his living room, an old color TV blizzarding with the volume down. He was dressed dramatically, sporting a red vest, a white turtleneck with a big-collared white shirt, and white pants with furry black racing stripes zagging across his thighs. But it was the oversize wristwatch studded with fake diamonds that caught one's eye—in the past, it was rare for women to wear watches—and Hajdari was rightly proud of it, as he was proud of everything he called home.

It had been a good life, "a happy life," as he put it, but still, each life had its challenges. You couldn't just snap your fingers and instantly have happiness. It came in the struggle. Hajdari had confronted his first—and perhaps biggest—hurdle when he was a she, and just 6. What clothes were you born to wear? That was the essential question most burrneshas could boil their crossroad down to. Society considered your physical attributes, then made you a boy or a girl. You weren't consulted—but then you were ensnared and programmed: You will like these colors. You will enjoy, or at least suffer, these pursuits. You will not look your husband in the eye. You will encourage men to avenge your brother's death.

There were many victims to this rigid line of thinking, perhaps a whole country.

But at 6, Hajdari had taken to wearing boys' clothes, too, and in response her mother had dressed her in fancy girls' clothing. Hajdari cowered under the bed in her finery, seized by acute shame, trembling. Then her mother tried to beat the impulse out of her, literally, with a belt, saying she was violating God's will, which only served to double Hajdari's resolve. This wasn't a choice, this sartorial urge; it was a need. Her girl's body dressed as a boy's. So what were you supposed to do with that?

Hajdari's father, Halil, had been taken prisoner during World War II and hauled off to Italy, where he'd remained in captivity for many years until they were sure he was dead and never to return. One day, when Hajdari was 14, a man came up the path to the farm, and saw her, and said, "Do you know who I am?" and she said, "No."

"I'm your baba," he said, and soon after this father of hers had settled back in, she went to him and told him, "I hate these women clothes and will always hate them. Please give me a cow and a little land and I'll make my own life as a man." Her father relented, and Hajdari took her vow of virginal celibacy and began to live as a he—and as he pleased, too.

As Hajdari spoke, his two great-nieces looked on adoringly. They were probably 14 and presented themselves as modern kids, minus the handheld devices. It was as if they were being told a fairy tale—and they sat rapt. This great-aunt of theirs was lively and energetic and more than just an aunt. In fact, they called her uncle. They laughed when he-she said something funny. They jumped to serve tea and cookies.

In Albania, they say every man has two childhoods, the first and then, with old age, the second. There was something childlike and sweet and wise about Hajdari, but there was an underlying hardness, too, for he'd lived a real life. His brother had died unexpectedly at 32, and Hajdari had helped his sister-in-law raise the five children. In order to support them, he'd opened a shop in town—and had worked. This, too, was the responsibility of the burrnesha, and Hajdari had taken it all on with a sense of urgency. When her nephew was shot in the mountains five years ago—ostensibly as part of a blood feud—he helped bury him, too.

It was that hardness in Hajdari that most compelled me, that 6-year-old under the bed, that will to find exactly who you were down there, no matter what. Whether your family or village or Albania at large was willing to accept this, the Kanun, in the name of patrilineal inheritance, had unwittingly created a loophole for you—and in the process had elevated this radical idea: that a woman might find completion, if only she disguised herself as a man. Perhaps it was a confusing mandate for some, to fully inhabit manhood while remaining virginal. Even the burrneshas themselves seemed confused sometimes. If stripped of all social construct and sexual prohibition, would they have lived as hes or shes, or some nuanced version of either? These were the sorts of questions that could never be asked without a swift kick in the shin from Haki. It was easier to let the Kanun guide the way.

"Even the grave won't keep you if you're a burrnesha," went another Albanian saying. And yet here was Hajdari, surrounded by family, neighbors, animals. He woke each morning the master of his destiny, and if he pleased, he wore pants with a furry racing stripe and a faux-diamond-encrusted wristwatch. There was nothing left to prove. He'd been right, all those years ago, beneath that bed. Despite his mother's God. One day his grave would be festooned with flowers, put there by the great-nieces who so adored him.

In search of another burrnesha,Ermal and I barreled the roads for a high-kill-rate place called Shkodër, an epicenter for these blood feuds. I wondered aloud if it was libido—i.e., the having of too many balls—that triggered the epidemic of violence here. Maybe a certain softness was exactly what Albania needed, since everyone, it seemed, had been touched by a murder. Even Ermal had a friend, a pastor, who'd been slain two years earlier. No, a man of the cloth was as much a target as anyone. Only a burrnesha seemed safe here.

As we drove, Ermal was pontificating again. This time it was America that was soft. Though he, like most Albanians, loves all things American, he wondered why Obama had apologized for spying on Germany when every other country did it, too. It was a disgrace. George W. Bush never would have apologized. Secondly, why were we slinking out of Afghanistan after making it our business for a dozen years? Did we understand what message that sent to the world? That we were weak. And then history would show that the Taliban beat back the great U.S.A., that our empire died in the moondust of that other country. America itself had confused its identity or assumed a new one, he said.

"So now we're the burrnesha," I said.

"Maybe," said Ermal.

"And would that be so bad?" I asked, but Ermal didn't answer.

At a bar just outside town, we met a sworn virgin named Lule. Nearby, a guy opened a bottle of beer with his teeth. It was not yet noon.

"It's a good life," said Lule, "but a very lonely one for the burrnesha." It was every Albanian father's fear for a daughter, that she'd end up alone.

In her late fifties, Lule was dressed in light chinos and a safari vest, wearing Bono-like wraparound sunglasses. She conveyed a pathos, in part brought on by some serious health issues that had limited her in recent years, but she told a familiar story: the desire to dress as a boy, her father's eventual approval. Lule had become a mechanic, and relished those bygone days of fixing tractors, cars, especially trucks. She adored working on trucks.

We went to lunch in downtown Shkodër, and as Lule and Ermal walked along the pedestrian mall, I noticed some passers-by doing double takes, especially teenagers, trying to place exactly what they were seeing: a hulking 25-year-old man walking with a hulking fiftysomething something. It was hard to tell. Which made them gawk all the harder. "Everybody always watches the burrnesha," Hajdari had said.

We went to a restaurant named San Francisco, playing those romantic American '50s crooners over the speakers, paintings of the Golden Gate Bridge on the wall. Lule ordered a steak, and when it came, he took the saltshaker, removed the top, and dumped a small white mountain on the meat. The waiter came back to inquire after our meals, and it was all there in that brief exchange: curiosity, disdain, confusion. Later, Ermal told me that when I'd asked about this life of his, the nature of that isolation, Lule'd been crying behind those glasses he never took off. That was something a man would never be caught doing here. And one thing—among others, I'm sure—I hadn't noticed at all, in his concealment.

It was about now, with only a couple of days left in Albania, that something began to dawn on me: The burrneshas, who had a beatific kind of solitude in those photographs I'd seen, who I thought might hold some secret about fully finding yourself in the world, were less mystic than human. They could describe formative events or details, but they weren't exactly progenitors of a movement. For the most part, they were a lost tribe, living remotely. They had limited education. They performed menial labor. But what they believed in was purity. And what they'd submerged in the end to achieve it wasn't their gender but their desire. Being aburrnesha was less about being a man—or repurposing yourself as a man—than it was about scrubbing yourself clean. Absolving and dissolving, until you'd achieved a new physicality, one that was, in some powerful way, nearly genderless. It really was about this transcendence.

Which is what made it increasingly uncomfortable to go knocking on doors. I felt like someone greedy with desire, a voyeur. When we came to Mark, who lived in a town outside the capital, we were met with a steely glare. He ran a small convenience store down an alley. He was even shorter than Haki, but blockier. He knew why we'd come, he said, and asked us to leave. The lesbian issue again. And he'd had enough, too. For almost his entire eighty years, he'd lived as a man, and no one had ever known. Then one of his family members revealed him, and in an instant everything had changed. Those in town regarded him differently; intruding strangers like us came around. He pointed to paintings on the wall, of Jesus on the Cross, of the Virgin Mary. This is who I am, he said. A man of faith. Good-bye.

Which left one last stop, this time in Tirana. Dressed in a black suit, wearing a black watch cap, Shkurtan moved slowly, walking with a cane. He was 83, and when he first approached us on the street, he truly was just another old man in the city, a friendly one at that.

Shkurtan was coincidentally from Haki's village in the north. He'd been secretary of the village Communist Party organization there, during the forty-year dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. After a lifetime in that magical valley, he'd moved to the capital a couple of years back, to be taken care of by family. We sat in a bar on a busy city street. Over coffee, he said he'd been born as a twin, two girls to begin, himself and Sosa, who would later have seven children of her own—and had died eleven years ago. (Of his five siblings, three were now dead.) As babies, he and Sosa fed from their mother's breast, one on either, he said laughingly, until he lost interest and then Sosa got double the milk. Growing up, he could remember waking early each day, working the land: hay for the cows; cucumber, onions, arugula, and tomatoes so big and juicy they called them "heart of the bull."

Shkurtan had large ears, little feet, a prominent nose, and rheumy eyes. The tip of his middle finger was gone, lost when his hand became tied up in rope that was attached to a runaway calf. His life now was mostly composed of sleeping and watching TV, eating "yogurt, cheese, and vegetables." And dreaming. He said he dreamed every night that he was back in the village with Haki. "I see my family there," said Shkurtan. "I see the weddings, and I see funerals, all the past times of the village. In my dreams, I'm organizing the people to work. They love and respect me again."

And then he wakes to this city life, into the formlessness of these days. According to Shkurtan, the old people say the country ended in 1990, when the Communists lost power. He once organized fifty workers, 300 people. "Haki was the most correct," he said, and a fantastic worker, but he was an enemy of the Communist state. Shkurtan made Haki's life hard for many years, but they were still good friends, more so now than ever. The phone rang—and in fact it was Haki on the other end.

Shkurtan smiled, his wrinkles bunching until he appeared young again.

"It's so good to hear your voice," he said. From the phone came a sound crackling from afar, indistinguishable.

"How are you?" asked Shkurtan.

"Do you have food in the house?"

"How's the calf?"

"And the blood-feud family? Tell them to take cover, because you never know."

"Are you lonely, Haki? I'm lonely."

"Do not feel lonely, okay?"

When he hung up the phone, he seemed spent. He reached for his espresso, shakily. It was almost time for a nap. Yesterday he'd spent the whole day in bed, sick, thinking of Sosa. He'd never return to the valley, he knew that. The road was too difficult.

"These are the last days for burrneshas," he said, as a matter of fact more than sentiment. "And then who will be left to look up to?"

···

When she was twelve, Lume asked God and her father to let her take the oath of the burrnesha.

From the shaking of his head yes and no, which meant no and yes, I still had no idea what Ermal—or his God—thought of what we'd seen. But as he drove me back to the hotel on the last night in Tirana, he told me something he'd probably been waiting to say for a while. When it came to the burrneshas, no, it wasn't right to exist in this in-between; everyone should live as their sex—and not in this sort of confusion and loneliness. He was glad that the burrneshas were nearing extinction, glad for the burrneshas themselves especially.

As Ermal was talking, the streetlights slid by on the wet windows, and the night beyond was very black and starless. Theburrneshas were sleeping—Haki in his valley; Lume on her mountaintop; Hajdari on the plain; Lule, in his loneliness; Mark, in anger; and Shkurtan, dreaming of big-hearted tomatoes. I was reminded of something Hajdari had said when I asked why, if the Kanun made allowance for sworn virgins to live as men, did it not make the same allowance for men to live as women. It was, to him-her, an obvious and very stupid question. "If a boy dresses and acts as a girl, it would be humiliating," Hajdari said. "He deserves a bad beating."

For a burrnesha, it was about the oath, about vowing to find a place and purpose in your family, and country, that offered no place for you.

I would have thought Ermal would have felt differently, after all we'd seen. He was so companionable, and he'd shown such an easy way with the burrneshas. He'd wrap an arm around the older ones, be very respectful in their presence. For a man who believed so fervently in his God's purity, and that spiritual otherworld, I thought he'd be quick to acknowledge the otherworld before our eyes, to allow that there might be things of confusion and wonder on this pocked road, in this wild country, and let them be.

In Haki's garden one last time, he smoked and simmered. He told me that he'd survived some very hard times. But he'd always had the house, the barn, the garden. He'd always had the well, and the fresh water in it. And he had relative peace. Because the next-door neighbors were in a blood feud, half of them had fled to France—and yet Haki was square with the world. He was still in charge of cleaning the mosque, lighting the candles there. He took care of his honeybees and the little orchard.

All of it was worth the isolation and now the loneliness that crept up in winter, when you found yourself in the winter of your own life. "The only thing I fear," said Haki, "is the snow." And it would come soon. Two winters earlier had brought a blizzard, leaving drifts over the house. The well froze. Bodies of old people piled up in the road, and helicopters took them away. Meanwhile, Haki's front door had been blocked by a wall of snow, and he panicked a little, trying to dig out with his bare hands. He knew the cow needed feeding. That's all he could think: Must feed the cow. It took several hours for him to dig, and climb, and he reached the barn roof exhausted, his fingers frozen, and started digging down, when suddenly he slipped and fell ten feet, landing on his back in a little ravine of the shifting snowscape. He lay there a long time, accepting that perhaps now it really was his time to die. The snow sifted down, covering him. He closed his eyes.

An hour later, he woke to stars, moved his arm, his leg, the other arm, then leg. He propped himself on his elbows and slowly regained his feet. Dusted the snow off. Finally got himself into the barn. Fed the cow—and tunneled back into the house. Once there, he wrapped himself in blankets and went to bed for a couple of days until the rescuers showed up. His family called, urging him to leave, but he refused. No way was he going to leave that damn cow behind.

"But it's just a cow," said one family member.

"I'm not leaving the cow," said Haki stubbornly, and they knew better than to argue. Remembering it now, Haki inhaled and blew out a cloud of smoke, eyes glinting over the house and barn again, to the mullaret,or cone-shaped haystacks, in the field, golden in the light.

"I need to maintain," he said. "I need to protect what I have."

And with that, he said, "I think we're done," quietly but emphatically, as if we really were, and led Ermal and me to the gate and the road, making sure we were in our car and well on our way before he turned and went back inside, to all the freedom she would have otherwise lost, had it not belonged to him.

Michael Paternitti is a GQ correspondent and author of The Telling Room.