"AH, I wish I was a pig!"

2025-09-28 09:40:00, Kulturë Agim Xhafka

This phrase saved me while watching TV. I was watching a documentary about Drojë, a village in Kurbin. My niece had just come for lunch and I was shocked by this sentence. It was a macabre, illogical desire, with madness inside. Not normal, so she was shocked. Her pupils dilated, she stood in front of me, I was on the couch in the living room and, as she was about to ask me, I didn't let her go.

-Yes, my dear, I really wanted to be a pig. Oh, how I wanted to! And not just me, but a large group of guys my age. When I say age at that time, I mean we were your age, or two years older to be exact.

He didn't speak, I saw that nothing was clarified. He stood in front of me again without moving. With the unspoken question, come on, explain to me! Or in short, have you reached the age to slip?!

-Sit down, girl, sit down on the couch and listen to me. It was my first year at university. It was a hot September that day and we didn't start the school season with lectures and seminars, but with military training. That was the system back then. We were preparing as future teachers, but also as ready soldiers. And we did this preparation in this village that the TV showed, called Drojë. There were bunkers built where we slept and learned the art of war.

The wake-up call sounded at 4 in the morning. After half an hour we ate a slanderous soup. Warm juice with a few pieces of tomato floating on the aluminum plate. Then we lined up in front of the command and for an hour the commissar explained to us politically. He told us that our country was in the mouth of the wolf, surrounded by enemies, but we were not afraid, we danced, we did not ask about them.

The enemy had us at gunpoint, we had them at gunpoint, and so on. We were only 17 years old, so we believed many things, but they also scared us. From the heat and fatigue, some in the line would collapse to the ground. They would faint. But the commissar continued to babble. At 8 o'clock, row after row, we would head up the mountain. We would disguise ourselves with thorns and tree branches so that the enemy wouldn't see us. We would stay like that for several hours.

With a rifle to our cheek and an eye on those who would invade our homeland. Which, for better or worse, our gaze was directed towards the river. To the fresh water where some pigs were playing and frolicking. Dogs from the cooperative. Every morning we saw them there. We lay there, undetected by the barbarians around us. Often in the sun, there was no shade there on the rock. From the heat our heads were burning like beans by the fire. We almost exploded. But we didn't speak because we were being punished. We were called deserters, we cried and at night we had to not sleep at all, but stand guard around the bunker. After lunch passed and the sun began to descend into the sea, we returned to the canteen.

We ate a plate of grosh with some beans that you had to be lucky to catch and bread. A lot of bread. It filled us up somewhat. In the afternoon we started reading the works of communist leaders, talked again with the commissar and late in the evening, after drinking tea as a third meal, we lay down to sleep. Dead, exhausted. A few hours before dawn, the bell rang and the officers entered the dormitory shouting, get out quickly, quickly, alarm, the enemy is attacking us.

This ritual, or this torture, lasted 30 days in a row. Masked, lying with our faces to the gun and our eyes on the pigs. The pigs were people, not us. They enjoyed freedom, freshness, were not under violence, did not receive punishments. They passed by jumping from one bank to the other. We did not dare to utter a word of dissatisfaction, a remark, a pain from fatigue or exhaustion.

We dreamed of dipping our feet in the river, rinsing our faces for two seconds, wetting our sweaty chests… Not that no one would let us, but we didn't dare ask for anything. To utter a word, a syllable. The pigs envied us. And as if to mock us, they would incessantly wag their short tails that resembled radio antennas.

Their life was far more beautiful than ours. It was more delicious. It was more complete. Indeed, one day they would go to the knife, but we lived constantly on the knife. We were on the knife every day. So almost all of us had one wish; ah, to be pigs! Ah, how we wanted to be like them! Ah!

That's all I said and it seemed I had become credible. The tone of voice in my explanation and the eyes soaked with those macabre memories did their job. Like paracetamol when a fever attacks. My niece hugged me, so she held me for a long time. As if she was afraid that I would not really become what I wanted. Or maybe my desire at that time would come true quickly. A desire that came out of the pain of those seasons that slipped by scratching our bodies and bleeding our souls./ CNA