I chilled for ten years at the coffee shop here. I followed through few generations, now Era and her friends are the youngest generation… nothing, I took walks, sometimes I… I want to tell you two stories. One day, when my older daughter Toska was little, my father asked her, ‘What does your father do?’ And she was wondering what her father does, ‘What does your father do?’ He was trying to help her, you know, to say a piktor [painter], and he said, ‘Pi – pi – p…’ She said, ‘Pijanec’ [A drunk] (laugh) and the other one, I am telling you what my second daughter told her teacher, that’s what I did ten years in a row. When her teacher asked her, ‘What does your father do?’ She said, ‘He has fun.’ (laugh)

While being in Maribor, in Slovenia and part of the Association, I travelled, I travelled by all means, you know, regardless of whether I had a car, regardless of whether I had savings, because you didn’t, you know, we had means, there was no need to think about savings. I went to festivals […] There are many festivals, many activities, they tried to have activities in other centers too, yes… For many years I was present, even when my compositions were not played, but I went to follow the festival. That was refreshing, their intensity was greater compared to ours and our conditions at the time. Therefore, even the inspiration was greater. Yes, even the inspiration, the innermost inspiration, and we tend to say that one needs solitude to create. You know, there is something true about that. You know, silence, solitude.

… it’s not because  of Paris or because of that contact that I got to hear only good orchestras, or only good artists, or attended only great cultural events, but from that position one observes more closely the flow of things here [in Kosovo]. I started understanding better, clearer, seeing  the value in Albanian music, or the values that you have, your personal values, right? You know, when you’re a bit farther away, you know that distance, let’s say even physical distance, but the cultural distance of the environment mostly, you understand better the environment where you will go back.

That is your primary environment, right? And I have understood it better and that is quite important, developing and following the standards that exist in a center of culture. First, researching, understanding, experiencing those standards, that makes you better, so that you to launch and to try to preserve those standards in the  less developed environment that  we were at the time.  You don’t see those standards if you go to Paris only once, for example, right?  You attend a concert and you come back and you think that is how it should be done. No, when… only when you experience the rhythm of a big cultural center.

My brother, who was the class monitor, told his colleague, […] ‘Give them some math homework for the summer,’ and he gave us some typewritten sheets. And I and my classmate, […]  with whom I finished eighth grade, Xhelal, we worked during the whole summer in the garden, under the shadow of the apple tree, he was a little better than I, the whole summer long, July, August until September, we split the math [homework], once each of us on our own, then we checked whether our results were correct. Well, we did it once, twice and three times. We did it and we thought, but alright, let’s say we pass the exam, but what are we going to do if we don’t? If you failed a class at that time, it was a big shame, you could not show your face in the village nor anywhere else.
And we, with our then childish mindset, took a decision […] if we failed a class, first,  we would kill ourselves, we would commit suicide; second, we would kill the professor with a knife, because we had no gun, and we could find a knife, we didn’t have a knife either, but we could find it, in our mind we had three alternatives; and three, this was a little easier, we would escape to Albania. My birthplace Veleshta, […] it’s twelve kilometers from Struga. […] We would take the ship from Struga, in the port, travel for two-three hours, it was a beautiful journey […] And we would go to  to Saint Naum. […] We would play, sing with friends and so on, and the border was near there […] We were not allowed to get closer  to it, but we looked at it from a distance and thought that in case we didn’t pass the math exam, there were three options: suicide, murder and escape. We thought that we could escape to Albania from there, because for my generation and the generation before me, Albania was a kind of paradise and every youth of that age dreamt of escaping to Albania, all of them.

When I started working in 1954, they would watch cowboy films. Those were popular, cowboy films, and then the Indian [native americans] films came, the Indian films begun in the ‘60s. And then people started coming to the cinema. Then there came the serial films, the Italian cowboy films. They would last 45 minutes, but [the cinema] would be full, a serial of 45 minutes each. There was profit from that, also from cowboy films. Especially when there was John Wayne, Tony Curtis and another famous actor, the hall was full, it was so crowded. Then the romance films began, the more educated would come to see those. And the youth always watched cowboy films, eh, bam bum, bam bum, when the gangsters won they would applaud.