Coach Marcello turned and spoke directly to Mehmet. "What about you, Mehmet? How do you feel about this?"
Mehmet didn't answer. He sat very still, his eyes on the floor.
"Tell the teacher," Baba said, speaking to Adona but looking all the while at Mehmet, "tell the teacher that my son has endured much more painful hardship than this. As a child, he was once in a Serbian jail, where he was beaten and left in a field to die." As Adona translated, Meli saw Mr. Marcello's eyes widen. Mrs. Rogers gasped. "He is very brave, my son," Baba continued, "and I am very proud of him. He will do the right thing. You will see."
Now Mehmet looked up at Baba, and for a moment Meli imagined she saw tears in her brother's eyes. He did not wait for Adona to finish her translation before he said quietly, "Baba is right. One man does not make a team. We must play together, or
there is no game."
Coach Marcello's hands stopped fiddling with his cap. He cleared his throat. "Thank you, Mehmet," he said. Then, very quietly, so that Meli did not hear it until it was repeated in her own language: "He says to tell you, Mr. Lleshi, that you are a good man, and he hopes that he will be as good a father to his children as you are to yours."
"Tell the kind teachers," Baba answered, "that Mehmet and Meli will be back for practice tomorrow."
***
The next morning Meli found Rachel waiting at her locker. "Don't hate me," she blurted out. "I was scared. That's no excuse, I know, but—"
"You told Mrs. Rogers, didn't you?"
"Yes, but..."
"That was brave, Rachel."
"I should never have let Brittany bully me. I hate myself, so I know you must hate me."
She looked so miserable that Meli reached out and touched her arm. "I could never hate you, Rachel. You're the one person who has always been kind to me."
"Until yesterday. Yesterday..."
"My baba says hate makes no sense. He's right. I want to forget about yesterday, okay?"
"Really?"
"Really."
It would be a long time before she and Rachel would eat a sack of salt together, but this was a beginning, wasn't it?
***
Although it wasn't the end of stares in the hallways and whispers in the cafeteria, things were different at school after that. Perhaps it was because Mehmet was different. He was still the best player, but now he was less arrogant, more sharing. Even the boys who had attacked him were forced to respect him.
Meli still worried about her brother. She wanted the last trace of his bitterness to dissolve. She wanted him to slap the other boys on their backsides and tell stupid jokes, which, knowing Mehmet, was most unlikely to happen. But he was trying to make Baba proud of him; that was clear. On Sunday afternoons he began to coach a soccer team for Isuf and Adil and their many little friends, and when Mehmet talked with the younger boys, she could see something of Baba's gentleness growing in him. Every now and then he spoke of returning home, but only when Kosovo was recognized as a nation, not so long as NATO insisted it was still simply a region of Serbia. "Only when we are a free country," he said.
One day, to her own surprise, she realized that she was no longer thinking of going back home to Kosovo. Not because she thought America was a perfect country. If it were a perfect country, Baba would have a good job by now, and Mama wouldn't have to clean motel rooms. Being Muslim or Christian or Jewish or nothing at all wouldn't matter, and the president wouldn't be talking about going to war in yet another Muslim land. Perhaps, though, there were no perfect countries. America was their new beginning, as Baba said, and she was beginning to like the person she was becoming. She had a real friend now. Rachel was not Zana, but she was Rachel, and Meli liked and trusted her.
Of course, some days she thought of Kosovo and felt a wave of homesickness for the things and people she had loved there. She longed for Granny and her funny old ways. She wished she could put flowers on Granny's grave and have coffee with Uncle Fadil and Auntie Burbuqe and Nexima. The twins were talking now. She wanted to talk to them before she forgot all her Albanian, which she knew was getting all mixed up with English words and no longer pure.
She wished she could know where Zana was. Meli had written more letters. None had been answered. She had asked Uncle Fadil, but the new family living in Zana's house had no idea what had happened to the previous owners. Meli dreamed one night that she was walking along the street in a strange American city, and coming toward her on the sidewalk was Zana, looking just as she had the last time Meli had seen her, when they were both eleven years old and misbehaving in Mr. Uka's school. She felt homesick all the next day.
But the homesickness passed. The family had held together. America was home now.
* * *
Historical Note
The history of Kosovo is a long and tangled one, and, as in all historical accounts, everything depends on who is telling the story. Kosovars like to recall their great hero Gjergi Kastrioti, better known as Skanderbeg. Skanderbeg was a fifteenth-century prince who fought the invasion of the Ottoman Turks. After his death, the Ottomans prevailed and completely occupied Albanian lands for 425 years. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when "Turkey in Europe," as the Balkan portion of the Ottoman Empire was sometimes known, began to break up, there was no way to go back to the national boundaries of pre-Ottoman days. Much of the territory had become part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the empire was defeated in World War I, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed from the southern Slav territories. Its name was changed in 1929 to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which literally means "South Slav," and the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was formed after World War II under the former freedom fighter known as Marshall Tito. In 1963 the country was once again renamed, this time as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or SFRY, and it was made up of six Socialist Republics, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Slovenia, and SR Serbia, which included the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Metohija (later included as part of Kosovo). Although there were Serbs and other minorities living in Kosovo, under Tito Kosovo's leaders were, by and large, Albanian Kosovars, as they made up the majority of the population.
When Tito died in 1980, there was a struggle for the control in Yugoslavia. In the Republic of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic began to take power, and in 1989 he was able to change the constitution in such a way as to reduce the autonomy of Kosovo and put Serbs in charge. Many Albanians lost their jobs and found their activities restricted.