The Doll Read online

  A moment would have come when the Doll thought they might turn their lorgnettes on her, with the words, ‘Ah, so this is the bride, let’s look at her more closely …’

  It is likely that the curiosity shown by this inspection through the lorgnettes was one of the first things the Doll related on her first visit home to her parents.

  This visit usually took place one week after the wedding and was for some reason called ‘the maiden’s dinner’, and it was certainly more important than any dinner or festival that followed.

  On such an occasion, an experienced eye could gather many things from the face of a girl who had just been transformed into a bride: pleasure, disappointment, perplexity … rarely happiness. It was a unique infiltration into the opposite camp, a parley of both intelligence and counter-intelligence. Even if it did not take a dramatic turn, when for instance the bride claimed refuge in her father’s home, this first communication from ‘the other side’ played an important role. The later attitude to the rival household, the strategy in matters purposely left unfinished – files on property or inheritance, for example – might depend on this visit home so fallaciously entitled ‘the maiden’s dinner’. This visit might set in motion the kind of covert diplomacy for which the old Gjirokastra houses were famous. Go-betweens who were used to these delicate matters, and let their remarks fall here and there as if by chance, might comment favourably or not on promises made earlier, such as the possibility of a long-term loan for repairs to the Kadare house.

  It is hard to discern if this phase of the Doll’s life, which might be called her Mata Hari period, introduced any complication into relations between the two families.

  According to what little she told me, she had no rapport of any kind with the other people of the household, apart from her little sister. Her two brothers always had their minds elsewhere, because they were both preparing to enter the lycée. Later they read the city newspaper Demokratia and talked about totally incomprehensible things such as the theories of Freud or Branko Merxhani, and prisoners of a new kind who had recently become fashionable, whom they called ‘political prisoners’.

  Her brothers’ opinions increasingly diverged from everyone else’s. When the Doll told them of the ladies’ lorgnettes, they laughed impatiently. According to them, the Kadare ladies used them to show off, because all the old families of Gjirokastra suffered from delusions of grandeur.

  Later, they ascribed the old mother-in-law’s decision not to leave the house to the same reason. According to them, all these crazy customs were a way of increasing authority. My elder uncle, who was in a higher class, added something that he had apparently read, and which I did not understand, about ‘exteriorising death’, or distancing it from you, as one might say.

  I have tried to imagine the Doll’s maiden’s dinner: in her father’s house, they did not hide the fact that they had been anxious, so their first questions were whether her husband had behaved properly, or blundered in some way. Her sisters asked other questions, of the most naive sort, such as whether she had tried to look through a lorgnette, and whether ‘she’ – her mother-in-law – was really as wise as they said. Other questions would be uttered in a whisper and not in front of her parents.

  The two days of her visit passed quickly, and the Doll set off just as she had arrived, escorted by Vito, a neighbourhood gypsy.

  It was natural that the Kadare house, no longer seen through a bridal veil, would look different, bigger and more mysterious.

  Whatever her mother-in-law’s expression may have been, frowning or smiling, it will have looked questioning, as she imagined what the young bride had been doing back home with her own family, what questions they had asked, what they had wanted to find out.

  Throughout that week, so different to the previous one, the Doll must have felt homesick, and perhaps less secure.

  Once, taking advantage of my grandmother’s absence from the room, she had taken up a lorgnette left by the window and put it to her eyes. As she said later, she thought that she would see Greece … And at the same time perhaps she would understand those faraway things that her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s friends talked about: the English, the war, Hitler …

  4

  HOUSES LIKE ours seemed constructed with the specific purpose of preserving coldness and misunderstanding for as long as possible. When I first dimly felt this, I must have been five or six years old. As so often with things I didn’t like or which frightened me, I at once started imagining ways to get round these feelings; I almost persuaded myself that everything would be different if our house were smaller, with only one storey, or without secret recesses I was forbidden to enter, not to mention the cellars, the cistern and the dungeon.

  For years on end I witnessed the frostiness between my grandmother and the Doll, so it wasn’t hard for me to imagine what had happened in the early period of her marriage.

  For a time the irritation between them did not show, but this delay did not offer any kind of hope. It was like the familiar expression just before the onset of winter, ‘how nice that the weather is holding’, which people say while also not expecting that winter will not come.

  The frigidity and hostility gradually increased. After the first defeats of the Doll’s army, as I liked to think of her resources in this battle – flowers, music, gypsies and all the rest – she called upon her secret weapon, her last hope: the superiority that came from her wealth. But this too was defeated.

  It was in this state of panic that, instead of the Doll surrendering, something happened which was truly unforeseen.

  It was at once a source of amazement, terror, delight and scandal.

  It was a trial.

  A trial within the Kadare household.

  A trial of an insoluble case.

  The whole thing took place in secret. Some relatives knew about it, but nobody could believe what was happening. They thought of the trial as the sort of mischief that sometimes took place in Gjirokastra. Perhaps the Kadares thought up this escapade because they already had a dungeon inside their house. Our prison is ready, why shouldn’t we hold a trial?

  Other people viewed it from a kind of psycho-philosophical angle, as something influenced by the legal environment in which my father had spent his entire life, as the fulfilment of the dream of an ordinary civil servant who, although coming from an old legal family, had remained a simple court summoner.

  Time would show that what happened was neither a jolly prank nor a symptom of schizophrenia. Gradually, as I grew up, it became clear to me that a legal process was taking place in our house, and that it had started before I was born. The astonishing thing was that as time passed, this ‘process’, instead of appearing grotesque, acquired a deeper meaning in my eyes.

  The questions of what this trial was, why it was being held, who was the judge and who was being convicted, troubled me for a long time.

  Finally I grasped that trials of this kind recurred time after time. The judge was my father and the defendants were two women: my formidable grandmother faced by the Doll, her antithesis. The trials were always over the same issue: the coldness and misunderstanding in the Kadare house. In other words, the acrimony between a mother and her daughter-in-law.

  At first, like many others, I could easily have said that my father had lost his wits. Later I became curious less about my father’s madness than something else: his hesitation. This involved the initial question of what sort of trial this was. If a trial was taking place over something, the judge was trying to identify a culprit. My father was undecided; he was in two minds.

  The case was not at all as simple as it first appeared. My father was hesitating about something that many people would be totally sure of. In other words, when he came back from work and saw the enraged faces of his mother and his bride, the natural thing to do would be to immediately blame the young wife – especially as his mother was a grand old lady of the Kadares who for years had not deigned to step foot outside her house, a house da
ting back to 1700, if not 1600, and who, since her husband, Shahin Kadare the judge, departed this world, had nobody but her only son, and had been famed for her wisdom ever since the time when her father-in-law Ismail Kadare had been mentioned in a famous song …

  Now, regardless of all this, her only son was doing something unprecedented, setting her on the scales against her daughter-in-law, to judge which of the two was in the right.

  ‘My son has gone mad.’ If she didn’t utter these words out loud, she no doubt whispered them to her sister, Nesibe Karagjozi, who came to visit twice a week, and after her to Auntie Xhemo, and then to other women friends, including the shades of the dead, to whom she perhaps told everything in even greater detail.

  As I grew up, I came to understand her anxiety better. An earthquake would have shaken us less than this shock delivered by my father. In the lycée, I racked my brains over this, while life went on as before. Under the influence of my reading, I understood that some surprising event, a turning point, was in the offing.

  However, while I could imagine my grandmother’s fear, I could not at all understand what the Doll might be feeling. Later, when I thought back to this long story, especially when both were dead, I was sure that the Doll’s idiosyncratic character must have helped her through this muddle. It even occurred to me that from that time I began to discern that the Doll had her own way of inspiring dread: a mixture of coldness and plaster-whiteness, a riddle like the masks of Japanese theatre or Voznesensky’s matmatma, in which a mother and darkness become one.

  This did not prevent me from looking for the cause of what had happened in a more tangible and less metaphysical form. Sooner or later, my mind hit upon that which, as they say, explains the inexplicable: love.

  I would have been astonished if someone had told me this at the time. I knew nothing about my mother’s private life, and would scarcely have imagined even the slightest kind of love affair before her engagement, until one day she herself told me something. It was the first time that the Doll confided in me.

  Izmini Kokobobo, a cousin of ours who followed fashion and liked to tease the Doll, would have burst out laughing to hear this event described as ‘a crush’. It was nothing of the sort.

  A short time before the Doll’s engagement, the three Dobi sisters were at a wedding where my mother’s future fiancé was expected to appear among the guests. The sisters were looking out for him from a window of the house, until one of them said, ‘Look, there he is, with the black Borsalino.’ The Doll’s heart dropped into the pit of her stomach. They had told her that her fiancé was handsome and tall, but the man in the Borsalino was stout, rotund. The Doll wanted to weep, but her little sister called out, ‘Wait, you fool, that’s not him. It’s the other one, on the right.’

  The Doll described how her heart returned to its proper place. She didn’t sleep that night from joy.

  I was at high school when she told me this story. During dinner, I said to her, ‘Mama, tell me how you fell in love with Father when you saw him from the window.’

  The Doll was embarrassed. ‘Why, was that love?’ she muttered.

  ‘Real love,’ my sister and I said, almost in the same voice. ‘Love at first sight,’ I went on. ‘That’s what it’s called. We’ve had it in class. Dante and Beatrice.’

  My father listened with complete indifference, as if we were talking about someone else.

  It was the first and last time that such a thing was mentioned. I knew nothing about, nor could I imagine, their intimacy together.

  A short time before the Doll passed away, she told me that she had something to ask of me. As she spoke, her voice faltered. She wanted to be buried in the same grave as ‘him’, meaning her husband.

  ‘Smajl, don’t laugh,’ she said. And she explained that she was frightened of being alone under the earth.

  I gave my word that I would do as she said.

  Later, when I dealt with this matter, which was not easy, because the laws and regulations changed every year, I could not help wondering whether this could really be called a love story, even a simple one: seeing a man from a window and then, three-quarters of a century later, wanting to be with him in the same grave.

  I became certain that this was indeed a love story, with a beginning and an end, like the Russian poet’s matma, or rather like those two mas with the letter t in between, belonging to both mother and darkness.

  Or so I told myself. Nevertheless, when I thought of the well-known house trials, I thought that even if the story involving a window and a death were true, it might explain many things but never the mystery of my father’s behaviour. (‘These brides nowadays, they know a few wiles that drive poor men out of their minds …’ After these words, my grandmother’s friends fixed their eyes on the old lady, but she, cold and disdainful, pretended not to understand. This business of ‘wiles’ not only failed to make me curious, but frightened me, because it seemed to belong to that secret aspect of the Doll.)

  In short, neither romantic love nor feminine wiles explained my father’s surprising behaviour, because such things were extremely ephemeral. Whereas the never-ending chronicle of the trials in our house was the very opposite of ephemeral.

  The ritual had continued unchanged for years. Sometimes one side won the case, and sometimes the other. The traces of tears on the Doll’s cheeks showed when she lost, and a spring in her step indicated the opposite. In the latter case, my grandmother withdrew spitefully to the second floor and did not come down for days on end.

  One day, quite by chance, it seemed the mystery that had tortured me for years had suddenly become clear.

  I do not remember why I’d been angry with the Doll, probably over my books, because I always became irritated when they were moved. I spoke harsh words, while she listened to me with a guilty look. I asked how she could possibly have failed to learn that my books must not be moved, and still she watched me with her bewildered gaze, as she always did when books were the subject. I must have repeated two or three times the words ‘how … possibly’ when she replied, ‘That’s what I’m like.’

  I don’t know what was special in her voice that made such an impression on me, but I felt my anger subside as I went on about the books without looking at her, and asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  There was no answer. Then, when I repeated the question, in a faint voice she said, ‘Well, sort of … you know yourself, I’m not very clever.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Who told you that? Izmini Kokobobo?’

  I uttered these words without lifting my head, as if I were frightened of seeing the tears in her eyes.

  She did not reply, perhaps emotion prevented her, and I did not provoke her further.

  Suddenly I felt a pang of tenderness as never before. I was fifteen years old and had never thought that a twinge of this kind could be so impossible to withstand. And with it, other things that I’d had occasion to feel, but had refused to make conscious, rushed into my mind and appeared with lightning clarity. These things had to do with the Doll’s unfounded naivety, with her extended adolescence, which made her unaware of many things, or mistaken in her interpretation of them. Perhaps this was why so much emphasis was placed on my grandmother’s wisdom, which caused the Doll so much suffering. And perhaps … and this was the main thing … here lay the answer to the riddle of my father’s behaviour. Since the first days of their marriage, he had probably felt that same tenderness I had. And it had been neither advice from his teachers nor his reading of the newspaper Demokratia which he carried in his jacket pocket every day, like the judges and lawyers he worshipped, but a corrosive feeling, unlike anything else in the world, that would drive him to overturn the habits of the three-hundred-year-old house of the Kadares and resort to … a trial.

  The trial was in fact between his mother and his wife, and would determine who was right: his mother, his wife, both, or neither!

  Defend the Doll, if necessary! From him, her husband, in all circumstances! Whenever and wher
ever. To the grave …

  5

  I HAD NOTICED that each member of our family had a unique relationship to the house. My grandmother’s was the most natural and obvious. One had the impression that long ago she had established a rapport with its archways, rafters and buttresses. The decision not to leave the house was evidently part of a process of becoming absorbed into it.

  My father’s own alliance with the house was strong but entirely different, founded on what had become the sole passion of his life: repairing it. For him everything else took second place. This was so generally known that when in our history class the teacher spoke to us about the great rebuilding undertaken by Marcus Aurelius, Ela Laboviti whispered to me from the next bench, ‘Just like your father!’

  I became increasingly sure that all this was more than a matter of repairs. It was probably connected to his authority, and, looking at it this way, one might say that my father, in attempting to fix the house, was merely trying to restore his own dominance.

  As one can imagine, the Doll’s connection to the house could only be superficial. She continued to be distressed by the size of the rooms, and indifferent if not hostile to repairs. Her expression ‘the house eats you up’ had earlier made me curious, because I could not tell which torture would be worse, being gnawed at slowly day by day, or gobbled up all at once. Now the phrase had acquired a third meaning, the truest and most dramatic of them all: poverty.

  My father’s weakness for repairs was also the main reason for our financial straits. My uncles openly teased him and would ask me, ‘What’s the Great Repairer up to? Planning an interior triumphal arch?’