GG Prifti

Edon Prifti has led the clarinet line of a southern-Albanian wedding band for thirty-five years: some nine hundred weddings by his own count, four generations of the same families, and one procession that carried on until dawn and into the next village. Backgammon is played in the band van, on a board with a cigarette burn in the outfield that he calls the pond. He has no ending in him. Thirty-five years of playing until the last guest sits down have left him unable to treat an evening as finished, and the board stays out long after the result has stopped being in doubt. Nobody has ever asked him for one more game and been turned down. He plays for chips, and he is the reason those evenings run as long as they do: a chouette breaks up when it runs out of players and he has never once been the player it ran out of. The cube is part of that rather than an exception to it: he turns it hard and early, because a doubled game is a bigger occasion, and the occasion has always been the point.