"Ē'shkėrdhatė!" He declared thoughtfully (as He really deserved the "declared thoughtfully" cliche) while relating the conversation He had just had with Henri, who left us both feeling a little dumbfounded with admiration about his tactics of taking over... our newly found world. The next day Henri tested Him by giving Him meat from a chicken, a pig, and a sheep and timing how long would it take Him to cut them all up. He set up a record of an impressive 19 minutes. Just as He put His knives down, Henri burst out a Trumpesque "You're hired!" with a list of hours and benefits and the payment which was double than what He had received at His previous job, not to mention 3 kgs of free meat of his choosing per week. Being an expert, He would pick out the rarest and the most expensive meat he could find in the store. Being an expert, He never had more than 10 kgs of leftover meat by the end of the week, which in itself was more than impressive.
By the end of the second week, two islanders who worked at the store came and complained to Henri that the payment was unfair. If Henri hadn't been a foreigner himself, they probably would have pulled out the all-too-classic-around-those-parts xenophobic card --- why should a foreigner, an Albanian nonetheless, enjoy such benefits. Henri pulled Him aside and asked him if He was able to repeat what He did during the interview and although I was not there I can imagine how He poofed up with pride or garipllėk, to be exact, and claimed that of course He could repeat the interview, any time, any place. The next morning Henri led the three men to the back of the store, set them up in three different tables and gave them each an identical amount of three types of meats. He did something mind-boggling to the pig's thigh, which was somewhat of a talent He had developed, by cutting up the meat so precisely without harming the bone that He could pull the thigh bone right out of the thigh with a simple movement of tugging at the knee. Henri had never seen that in his store. He beat His previous record by 7 minutes. Henri locked the door behind him so that the two men could not cheat by having the rest of the staff help them and took Him out for coffee and pizza across the street. I was terrified for Him, not in the sense that I feared He could fail, but from the uneasiness of being aware that there were people around us who, for no reason at all, wanted to crumble the citadel of ardor that I had raised all around Him in veneration, heartthrob by heartthrob. In a sense, it was my failure I feared. My own fortress was too human instead of allegorical, esoteric or abstract, even. Things without a heartbeat have a way of surviving.
They returned to the store, and as Henri unlocked the door about 85 minutes later, the two men were pleasantly shocked and mildly horrified that the two butchers still hadn't finished cutting up the meat. Henri made them stop and with an air of cockiness and pretensious disappointment, told them that, gentlemen, he had given them an hour and a half to finish the job, and here was a man who did it in 12 mind-blowing minutes. He didn't just work twice as fast, like the wage indicated, but at least six times faster. Therefore, His wage was not a lot, in fact it was ridiculous when matched against His abilities. Henri apologized but he was going to stick with his decision -- He proved himself more than worthy of the wage and the job.
We went to the beach that night. Someone was playing the guitar, talking in a rhythmic voice and breaking into a song here and there about a girl he had known when she was young. He must have been 26 years old (24 is too young, 28 is too old), dressed in carefully selected clothes whose purpose was to show the world that the wearer possessed a philosophy of not caring about what he wore or the image he gave out, because if people were that shallow, then they deserved not to know him. He looked like the unshaven Albanian teens in the mid '90's, with their torn jeans, faded T-shirts and hard rock bands, a philosophy book in one hand and an analysis on the religious history of Albania in the other... and a specific girl in their soul (she had to be young, silent, all-knowing, and lost to them). It would be too much, too forward, of me to say that I felt I knew a stranger, but I'll say that hearing the song and seeing the singer, recognizing in him some sort of an old archetype, it made me feel good in the way one feels when they've met a childhood friend.
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