The Doll Read online

  I didn’t know how to reply. My grandmother had explained to me that my father worried about repairs more than he should, but there was no getting away from them.

  If each person had their own special bond with the house, my relationship was the least clear of all. It was hard to explain because there were no words for it. Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.

  It was easy for instance to talk about the house of the big doctor Laboviti, where our entire class had gone to wish Ela a happy birthday. Everyone said how beautiful it was inside. Or how warm. And if some thoughts were left unspoken, we all knew that they had to do with the notorious dinner for the Germans. Whereas it was hard to say things like this about our house, where the class also came to congratulate me on my birthday. It was even hard to guess what my schoolmates’ private thoughts were. I remember that when Kiço Rexha begged me in a whisper to tell him the whereabouts of the dungeon, as he called the prison, I nodded in its direction, but when he asked if my father had ever put me into it, I answered no, and at the same time felt insulted.

  If anyone had asked me what my house looked like, I wouldn’t have known how to reply. This stemmed from a feeling that I dared not confess to anyone. A part of the house appeared to me … unreal. This was not a matter of imagination and fantasy, but of totally tangible spaces. On the second floor for instance, behind the room with the fireplace, or the winter room, as we called it, there were two unfinished partitions left after the most recent repair of 1936. I had long understood that every repair project spawned one or two more rooms – or the reverse, swallowed a couple. Shut up with temporary doors, nailed with two crossed planks, these chambers always attracted me. Beyond the planks, you could see rafters and half-finished windows in a beautiful, soft, falling light, especially in the afternoon.

  These were not yet rooms but ‘sort of’ and ‘not yet’ spaces, and nameless embryos of this kind filled our house. The summer room. The winter corner. The balcony room. The big gallery, or the little gallery.

  I was impatient for these rooms to be born, after such a long gestation, even as I realised that my father’s sole desire in life, the next repair, would never be totally fulfilled.

  My grandmother was to die in 1953, my father in 1975, and the Doll in 1994. The house itself would unexpectedly cease to exist in 1999. During the war, when German-occupied Gjirokastra was bombed by the English, I heard a lot about its possible destruction from the air. People said that two bombs from a heavy English bomber could raze to the ground this three-hundred-year-old house, which seemed so indestructible.

  Ever since then, I seem always to glimpse in the sky an English aircraft, blindly but insistently looking for …

  To get back to the story of the Doll, I remember a phrase written on the wall by the not-yet-annexes, a favourite place of mine to leave notes, in the shape of half a line of verse, or rather the name of a girl from Form B, whom I was sure I would never forget.

  The phrase ‘If Izmini Kokobobo did not exist …’ was incomplete, but I knew what was missing. If Izmini Kokobobo did not exist, the Doll would feel better.

  This seemed cynical. Perhaps this was why the phrase was left unfinished. But its meaning was less cynical than it was grotesque.

  Izmini Kokobobo was a cousin of ours who had returned from Italy. She was one of the girls of the city who had interrupted her studies in 1939 in protest against the Italian invasion. Later, for the same reason, she had joined the partisans, ending up with an official position under the new regime. She was the only person who, when she came on business to Gjirokastra, stayed with us instead of in chilly hotels. She brought news from the capital city, and also her roaring laughter, accompanied by flourishes of her reddish hair.

  Everybody was always thrilled at her arrival, except for the Doll. Moreover, my mother’s coldness, the cause of which she stubbornly tried to hide, only increased as the days passed. Clearly Izmini irritated her. And when she saw the Doll becoming annoyed, she persisted. We were all sure that she meant no harm.

  It all started over a perfume. This was so like the Doll: a matter of lavender water, as they called perfume in Gjirokastra.

  I remember very well the day when what would later be called ‘the incident of the German’s perfume’ took place. Three Germans had come to search for weapons. They turned everything upside down, including my grandmother’s trunk and the Doll’s hope chest.

  Soon after they left, the Doll could be heard sobbing. They had taken her perfume. Her best and most expensive, which her father had ordered from Salonica on the day of her engagement.

  The incident would be remembered for a long time. Izmini Kokobobo was the first to say, laughing, that for the Doll the whole of World War Two was summed up in that lost perfume.

  The Doll was not noted for her argumentative skills, but nevertheless replied that of course she, Izmini Kokobobo, would say that, because she thought that her own lavender water … like everything else of hers … was the best.

  My sister and I both thought that the senseless rivalry between these two women had started with this exchange at dinner.

  In fact, there were even earlier signs of the Doll’s vanity and self-regard, so unlike her usual shadowy self-effacement. This was especially striking when we set off together to visit her father. According to a custom that the post-war new order had still not succeeded in abolishing, the city’s women, when they ‘went to their father’s’, were escorted by a Roma woman. This woman carried a bundle with a change of clothes, and the baby if there was a child, while the escorted lady carried only her parasol.

  There were two such women living near us, Zëra and Vito, mother and daughter, who regularly accepted requests to act as escorts.

  On the way to my grandfather’s, the Doll maintained a theatrically stiff appearance. My uncles, chancing to meet her at the gate, responded to her in similar stage voices: ‘Welcome, Mrs Kadare!’

  When I reached the age of twelve, they thought that I too was infected by a touch of vanity.

  It was 1947. The newspaper The Young Penman had made fun of me in its ‘Replies from the Editor’ on the fourth page, and to emphasise the mockery, had printed my name as I had written it myself: Ismail H. Kadare.

  Worse luck, my two uncles had seen that reply, and almost in one voice said to me that if I had decided to follow in the tradition of swollen-headed Kadares, and call myself Ismail Hello Kadare, on the model of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, I should henceforth insert the prefix de, as the French writer Balzac had done. According to them, having grown up plain Smajl Kadare I would end up as Ismail de Kadare, which meant nothing. They did not fail to point out that the name ‘Ismail’ did not at all suit a famous writer, although ‘Kadare’ had real class.

  Two years later I was involved in an incident, which showed the disadvantages of fame. Together with a schoolmate, I ended up in prison. Not in the house prison, as some people thought at first, but in the real one, the state’s. It was a tale of some counterfeit five-lekë coins, made of lead, which I had shown to all and sundry. They arrested us during our gym lesson and we slept for two nights among handcuffed prisoners. Although we had not broken the law, a trial was held according to the proper procedure. Our lawyer, Hilmi Dakli, took his place at our side. The presiding judge intoned the words ‘In the name of the people’. My father stood there in the courtroom, just as he had done hundreds of times during his life as a court summoner. For him, it must have been like a bad dream. This was the second occasion that I had entered his own sphere: a short while before, as if to measure up to him, I had earned a fee, in actual money. And now I was in court. Soon I would be imitating him by asking, ‘When will this house be repaired?’

  When my uncles later found the notebook in which I had started my first novel, they told me that they were finally sure I suffered from megalomania. Three-quarters of the notebook was filled with advertisements along the lines of: ‘The century’s most demonic novel, hurry to the Gutenberg bookshop, bu
y I. H. de Kadare’s magnificent posthumous novel,’ with the price in gold franga and so on, whereas the text of the novel took up no more than five or six pages, and was incomplete, because, apparently worn out after the advertisements, I had abandoned the project.

  When my first book of poetry was published and a telegram arrived from the publisher summoning me to Tirana, my father unexpectedly decided that I should go the whole way by taxi. It was this last bit, the taxi, that drew the most attention. Many people asked me in astonishment, ‘Did you really go all the way to Tirana in a taxi?’ Some people did not believe it, and others thought that going by taxi was part of publishing a book and becoming a famous writer.

  6

  AFTER ANY exciting incident, the house seemed even duller. That winter the wind whistled more loudly through the rafters, out of spite. For some time my grandmother had refused to come downstairs, supposedly because of the pain in her knees, although it was hard to tell when this was in fact out of spite and when it was not.

  Nor did any real news come from my grandfather’s house, except for the letter that my eldest uncle Qemal Dobi had sent from Budapest. He wrote that everyone was asking him if he was related to the president of Hungary, István Dobi.

  I started two novels, one after another, driven more by impatience to use my ordinary name, Smajl, on the advice of my younger uncle, rather than any desire to write. So I left both unfinished, not even getting halfway through the advertisements.

  In 1953 my grandmother died. Her departure ended what might be called ‘the judicial era’ in our house.

  The sudden emptiness bewildered everyone, especially the Doll. I thought more than ever about her long-running irritation with my grandmother, and still I could not work out who had been in the right. Even today, after so many years, I cannot find the truth, and I even think that perhaps I have no right to look for it, as happens when the bitterness of a quarrel is so deep that any mere explanation pales beside it.

  It was at about the time of my first book of poetry, or rather my taxi ride, when the Doll first asked me if I had really become famous, as they said, and then braced herself to ask something else. Boys like that, when they became so … that is, celebrated … did they take their mothers with them to where they went? It was a while before I worked out that she was talking about boys like me. Still, I couldn’t understand her. ‘Where should they take them?’ I asked her. ‘In the taxi? To the publisher?’

  Finding it hard to explain, she got angry.

  She came back to this conversation a few days later.

  ‘Will you listen to me a bit?’ she said. ‘I want to have talks.’

  For a while, she had been speaking in unusual phrases, like those of newspaper headlines or ‘Microphone Theatre’.

  ‘Talks,’ I repeated to myself. Bilateral government talks.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ she said, ‘I’m serious.’

  Even though she had apparently long prepared for these ‘talks’, she made a mess of everything. Finally, I grasped the gist of what she wanted to say. She had heard that boys, when they became famous, swapped their mothers.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘What? What?’ I repeated, interrupting her. ‘They swap their mothers if they’re unsuitable?’

  ‘Don’t laugh, Smajl.’

  ‘You mean they choose a different mother, an opera singer for example? Or a member of the academy? Who told you such nonsense? Izmini Kokobobo?’

  The Doll lowered her eyes.

  I went on roaring with laughter, because I sensed that it was making her feel better. Slightly relieved, she too started to smile.

  ‘But, Mother, how can you believe such nonsense? Are you really so silly?’

  She went on smiling in her confusion, but didn’t admit that it was her cousin from the capital who had given her this idea.

  Izmini Kokobobo’s next visit made it obvious. The Doll could not conceal her apprehension. As on previous occasions, Izmini didn’t avoid argument, and indeed provoked it further. ‘What have you got against me?’ she asked.

  My father didn’t usually care for loud laughter, but was untroubled by our cousin’s. This seemed to upset the Doll. ‘What have I got against you?’ she blurted out bitterly. ‘You think you’re the bee’s knees because you went to school in Italy. That’s what I’ve got against you.’

  This time, Izmini’s mirth was so explosive it drowned out her own words and the Doll’s replies. Then, in the middle of this exchange, something shifted. ‘What?’ said Izmini, and the Doll made no reply, which led the other woman to repeat in the ensuing silence, ‘What?’

  The Doll, as stubborn as ever, did not answer.

  Izmini Kokobobo’s expression froze. ‘You mentioned Enver,’ she said. ‘Could you explain more clearly?’

  Astonishingly, my father, who generally did not interfere in such matters, interrupted. Later it struck me that perhaps the sudden creation of a courtroom atmosphere made him pipe up. ‘You mentioned Enver Hoxha,’ he said to the Doll. ‘I thought you did too.’

  The Doll must have said something sour, because Izmini Kokobobo’s expression remained icy. The Doll was still silent and my father repeated: ‘So what were you trying to say? Speak up, explain yourself.’

  A long time later, I would remember the Doll’s face in connection with what I had come to think of as the secret terror of white plaster, which the Doll would one day inspire.

  The Doll’s explanation was astonishing. ‘I wanted to say that if she was as much a lady as she seems, Enver Hoxha would not have thrown her out because …’

  ‘Because of what?’ my father said. ‘Speak up.’

  After a short hesitation, the Doll replied, ‘Because she didn’t know how to make conversation.’

  Izmini Kokobobo’s face went pale.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ my father said to the Doll. ‘Where did you hear such tittle-tattle?’

  I waited for Izmini Kokobobo to say the same, but she remained silent.

  My grandmother was no longer there to change the topic of conversation (mentioning somebody’s rheumatism had been her favourite way of doing this), but although it took another direction of its own accord, everyone kept thinking of what had just been said.

  The more I thought about it, the more illogical it all appeared to me, starting from the very idea of being thrown out for being a poor conversationalist. But Izmini Kokobobo’s state of shock baffled me more than anything.

  Although the Doll never told where she’d heard about it, this incident involving Enver Hoxha in Tirana was true. Izmini Kokobobo had been acquainted with the future chief a long time ago in Gjirokastra, and in clandestine circles in the capital city. Later, after the establishment of communism, she sometimes went for lunch to the Hoxhas, until one day a careless remark put an end not only to her visits but to her entire career. It was a casual conversation, in which the party was mentioned, or more accurately the party’s view of such-and-such an issue, when an expression had escaped her lips in the joking manner of former times: ‘Oh, come on, what the party thinks – you mean what you yourself think …’

  Enver Hoxha had frowned and said, in a serious voice, that Izmini Kokobobo had a mistaken idea of the role of the party. This was enough for the door of the first house in the country to be closed to her forever.

  The year 1953 seemed extraordinary, or sometimes quite the opposite. Various events took place between the deaths of Stalin and my grandmother, but it was hard to predict whether they would be remembered or not. The most sensational of these was the arrival of condoms in the city pharmacy. There were contradictory instructions permitting and prohibiting them. It was suspected they might be a test to identify any weakening of the class struggle after the death of Stalin. But then it was realised that the measure was at the insistence of the Soviets and was linked to women’s rights (Rosa Luxemburg, etc.), and after some hesitation by the party committee over whether communists should be ad
vised to avoid the pharmacy and leave these bits of rubber to the increasingly depraved bourgeoisie, everything calmed down.

  Our house remained desolate. Waiting for the publication of my book of poetry, I wrote some prose, and for the first time I did not fill most of the notebook with advertisements and self-praise. I stared in amazement at the first page on which I had written ‘On Foreign Soil, October 1953’. There was nothing about a demonic or Dante-esque work, no encouragement to run to the bookshop, and especially no price in gold franga from the time of the monarchy.

  Meanwhile, this business of publishing poetry seemed to me unreal. When somebody referred to it, I would remember the taxi journey, and not the book.

  Surprisingly, this did not make me more modest. On the contrary. It was Ela Laboviti who first pointed it out: ‘You’ve got very big-headed recently.’ Then, a time-waster who never opened his mouth about anything said the same thing, and I dimly grasped what had happened. The advertisements and boasts that I had eliminated from my new prose-writing were determined to find a way out, and had found one. My conceit had been displaced.

  The Doll had her own ways of knowing things, although more of taking no notice of things, and became aware of my swollen head. In her mind, fame and conceit appeared to be the same thing, and she mixed up these words in her own way.

  When one day my cousin and loyal friend Bardhyl B. came to me with a black eye, I realised the Doll was not the only one who’d got confused. Bardhyl B. had been fighting with the boys of 3C over the very issue of my big-headedness.

  The quarrel wasn’t about whether I was conceited, because both sides agreed on this, but something else: did I or did I not have the right to be conceited? According to Bardhyl B., I had every reason: I published poems in the literary press, and received fees. I had travelled by taxi to take my book to Tirana, I had spent two nights in prison, and finally I had written two love letters to a girl in 2B.

  The fight was over the last point: the love letters. My imprisonment was not considered to my credit, but a disgrace, especially because I had been defended by a bourgeois lawyer. But it was unclear whether I was a winner or a loser in the question of love. In fact, this was not very clear to either Bardhyl B., who took my side in all possible circumstances, or to myself. Bardhyl B. had passed the letters to Ylberja, our faithful friend, and because the girl in question had neither burst into tears nor threatened to hit me on the head with her shoe, but had on the contrary said ‘thank you’, we counted it a victory. But to our opponents the opposite seemed true, and moreover they said the two letters were wretched ones. They then recalled the case of a boy from the next neighbourhood, who came from the capital city and wrote one hundred and seven letters to a girl in his class, and was consequently excluded from every school in Albania.